KAFKA DIARY

Diaries 1914





2 January. A lot of time well spent with Dr. Weiss.



4 January. We had scooped out a hollow in the sand, where we felt quite comfortable. At night we rolled up together inside the hollow, Father covered it over with trunks of trees, scattering underbrush on top, and we were as well protected as we could be from storms and wild beasts. “Father,” we would often call out in fright when it had already grown dark under the tree trunks and Father had still not appeared. But then we would see his feet through a crack, he would slide in beside us, would give each of us a little pat, for it calmed us to feel his hand, and then we would all fall asleep as it were together. In addition to our parents we were five boys and three girls; the hollow was too small for us, but we should have felt afraid if we had not been so close to one another at night.



5 January. Afternoon. Goethe's father was senile when he died. At the time of his father's last illness Goethe was working on Iphigenie.


“Take that woman home, she's drunk,” some court official said to Goethe about Christiane (his lover).


August (Goethe's son by Christiane), a drunkard like his mother, vulgarly ran around with common women. Ottilie, whom he did not love but was made to marry by his father for social reasons.


Wolf, the diplomat and writer.


Walter, the musician, couldn't pass his examinations. Withdrew into the Gartenhaus for months; when the Tsarina wanted to see him: “Tell the Tsarina that I am not a wild animal.” “My conscience is more lead than iron.”


Wolf's petty, ineffectual literary efforts.


The old people in the garret rooms. Eighty-year-old Ottilie, fifty-year-old Wolf, and their old acquaintances.


Only in such extremes does one become aware of how every person is lost in himself beyond hope of rescue, and one's sole consolation in this is to observe other people and the law governing them and everything. How, outwardly, Wolf can be guided, moved here or there, cheered up, encouraged, induced to work systematically—and how, inwardly, he is held fast and immovable.


Why don't the Tchuktchis (who live in arctic Siberia) simply leave their awful country; considering their present life and wants they would be better off anywhere else. But they cannot; all things possible do happen, only what happens is possible.


A wine cellar had been set up in the small town of F. by a wine dealer from the larger city near by. He had rented a small vaulted cellar in a house on the Ringplatz, painted oriental decorations on the wall, and had put in old plush furniture almost past its usefulness.



6 January. Dilthey: Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (Experience and Poetry): Love for humanity, the highest respect for all the forms it has taken; stands back quietly in the best post from which he can observe. On Luther's early writings: “the mighty shades, attracted by murder and blood, that step from an invisible world into the visible one” —Pascal.


Letter for A. to his mother-in-law. Liesl kissed the teacher.



8 January. Fantl recited Tête d'or: “He hurls the enemy about like a barrel.”


Uncertainty, aridity, peace—all things will resolve themselves into these and pass away.


What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.


Description of inexplicable emotions. A.: Since that happened, the sight of women has been painful to me, it is neither sexual excitement nor pure sorrow, it is simply pain. That's the way it was too before I felt sure of Liesl.



12 January. Yesterday: Ottilie's love affairs, the young Englishman—Tolstoy's engagement; I have a clear impression of a young, sensitive, and violent person, restraining himself, full of forebodings. Well dressed, dark, and dark blue.


The girl in the coffeehouse. Her tight skirt, her white, loose, fur-trimmed silk blouse, bare throat, close-fitting gray hat. Her full, laughing, eternally pulsating face; friendly eyes, though a little affected. My face flushes whenever I think of F.


Clear night on the way home; distinctly aware of what in me is mere dull apathy, so far removed from a great clarity expanding without hindrance.


Nikolai Literaturbriefe (Letters on Literature).


There are possibilities for me, certainly, but under what stone do they lie?


Carried forward on the horse—


Youth's meaninglessness. Fear of youth, fear of meaninglessness, of the meaningless rise of an inhuman life.


Tellheim: “He has—what only the creations of true poets possess—that spontaneous flexibility of the inner life which, as circumstances alter, continually surprises us by revealing entirely new facets of itself.”



19 January. Anxiety alternating with self-assurance at the office. Otherwise more confident. Great antipathy to “Metamorphosis.” Unreadable ending. Imperfect almost to its very marrow. It would have turned out much better if I had not been interrupted at the time by the business trip.



23 January. B., the chief auditor, tells the story of a friend of his, a half-pay colonel who likes to sleep beside an open window: “During the night it is very pleasant; but in the morning, when I have to shovel the snow off the ottoman near the window and then start shaving, it is unpleasant.”


Memoirs of Countess Thürheim: “Her gentle nature made her especially fond of Racine. I have often heard her praying God that He might grant him eternal peace.”


There is no doubt that at the great dinners given in his honor at Vienna by the Russian ambassador Count Rasumovsky, he (Suvorov) ate like a glutton the food served upon the table without pausing for a soul. When he was full he would get up and leave the guests to themselves.


To judge by an engraving, a frail, determined, pedantic old man.


“It wasn't your fate,” my mother's lame consolation. The bad part of it is, that at the moment it is almost all the consolation that I need. There is my weak point and will remain my weak point; otherwise the regular, hardly varying, semi-active life I have led these last days (worked at the office on a description of our bureau's activities; A.'s worries about his bride; Ottla's Zionism; the girls' enjoyment of the Salten-Schildkraut lecture; reading the memoirs of Thurheim; letters to Weiss and Löwy; proof-reading “Metamorphosis”) has really pulled me together and instilled some resolution and hope in me.



24 January. Napoleonic era: the festivities came hard upon each other, everyone was in a hurry “to taste to the full the joys of thc brief interlude of peace.” “On the other hand, the women exercised an influence as if in passing, they had really no time to lose. In those days love expressed itself in an intensified enthusiasm and a greater abandonment.” “In our time there is no longer any excuse for passing an empty hour.”


Incapable of writing a few lines to Miss Bl. (Grete Bloch), two letters already remain unanswered, today the third came. I grasp nothing correctly and at the same time I feel quite hale, though hollow. Recently, when I got out of the elevator at my usual hour, it occurred to me that my life, whose days more and more repeat themselves down to the smallest detail, resembles that punishment in which each pupil must according to his offense write down the same meaningless (in repetition, at least) sentence ten times, a hundred times or even oftener; except that in my case the punishment is given me with only this limitation: “as many times as you can stand it.”


A. cannot calm himself. In spite of the confidence he has in me and in spite of the fact that he wants my advice, I always learn the worst details only incidentally in the course of the conversation, whereupon I have always to suppress my sudden astonishment as much as I can—not without a feeling that my indifference in face of the dreadful news either must strike him as coldness, or on the contrary must greatly console him. And in fact so I mean it. I learn the story of the kiss in the following stages, some of them weeks apart: A teacher kissed her; she was in his room; he kissed her several times; she went to his room regularly because she was doing some needlework for A.'s mother and the teacher had a good lamp; she let herself be kissed without resistance; he had already made her a declaration of his love; she still goes for walks with him in spite of everything, wanted to give him a Christmas present; once she wrote, Something unpleasant has happened to me but nothing came of it.


A. questioned her in the following way: How did it happen? I want to know all the details. Did he only kiss you? How often? Where? Didn't he lie on you? Did he touch you? Did he want to take off your clothes?


Answer: I was sitting on the sofa with my sewing, he on the other side of the table. Then he came over, sat down beside me, and kissed me; I moved away from him towards the arm of the sofa and was pressed down with my head against the arm. Except for the kiss, nothing happened.


During the questioning she once said: “What are you thinking of? I am a virgin.”


Now that I think of it, my letter to Dr. Weiss was written in such a way that it could all be shown to F. Suppose he did that today and for that reason put off his answer?



26 January. Unable to read Thürheim, though she has been my delight these past few days. Letter to Miss Bl. now sent on its way. How it has hold of me and presses against my brow. Father and Mother playing cards at the same table.


The parents and their grown children, a son and a daughter, were seated at table Sunday noon. The mother had just stood up and was dipping the ladle into the round-bellied tureen to serve the soup, when suddenly the whole table lifted up, the tablecloth fluttered, the hands lying on the table slid off, the soup with its tumbling bacon balls spilled into the father's lap.


The way I almost insulted my mother just now because she had lent Elli Die böse Unschuld (Evil Innocence), which I had myself intended to offer her only yesterday. “Leave me my books! I have nothing else.” Speeches of this kind in a real rage.


The death of Thürheim's father: “The doctors who came in soon thereafter found his pulse very weak and gave the invalid only a few more hours to live. My God, it was my father they were speaking of! A few hours only, and then dead.”



28 January. Lecture on the miracles of Lourdes. Free-thinking doctor; bares his strong and energetic teeth, takes great delight in rolling his words. “It is time that German thoroughness and probity stand up to Latin charlatanism.” Newsboys of the Messager de Lourdes: “Superbe guérison de ce soir!” “Guérison affirmée!” (Superb cure this evening! Proven cure!)—Discussion: “I am a simple postal official, nothing more.” “Hôtel de l'Univers.”— Infinite sadness as I left, thinking of F. Am gradually calmed by my reflections.


Sent letter and Weiss's Galeere (Galley) to Bl.


Quite some time ago A.'s sister was told by a fortune-teller that her eldest brother was engaged and that his fiancée was deceiving him. At that time he rejected all such stories in a rage. I: “Why only at that time? It is as false today as it was then. She hasn't deceived you, has she?” He: “It's true that she hasn't, isn't it?”


2 February. A.: A girl friend's lewd letter to his fiancée. “If we were to take everything as seriously as when we were under the domination of the confessional sermons.” “Why were you so backward in Prague, better to have one's fling on a small scale than a large.” I interpret the letter according to my own opinion, in favor of his fiancée, with several good arguments occurring to me.


Yesterday A. was in Schluckenau. Sat in the room with her all day holding the bundle of letters (his only baggage) in his hand and didn't stop questioning her. Learned nothing new; an hour before leaving he asked her: “Was the light out during the kissing?” and learned the news, which makes him inconsolable, that the second time W. kissed her he switched off the light. W. sat sketching on one side of the table, L. sat on the other (in W.'s room, at 11 p.m.) and read Asmus Semper aloud. Then W. got up, went to the chest to get something (a compass, L. thinks, A. thinks a contraceptive), then suddenly switched off the light, overwhelmed her with kisses; she sank down on the sofa, he held her arms, her shoulders, and kept saying, “Kiss me!”


L. on another occasion: “W. is very clumsy.” Another time: “I didn't kiss him.” Another time: “I felt as if I were lying in your arms.”


A.: “I must find out the truth, mustn't I?” (he is thinking of having her examined by a doctor). “Only suppose I learn on the wedding night that she has been lying. Perhaps she's so calm only because he used a contraceptive.”


Lourdes: Attack on faith in miracles, also attack on the church. With equal justification he could argue against the churches, processions, confessions, the unhygienic practices everywhere, since it can't be proved that prayer does any good. Karlsbad is a greater swindle than Lourdes; Lourdes has the advantage that people go there out of deepest conviction. What about the crackpot notions people have concerning operations, serum therapy, vaccination, medicines?


On the other hand: The huge hospitals for the pilgrimaging invalids; the filthy piscinas; the brancards waiting for the special trains; the medical commission; the great incandescent crosses on the mountains; the Pope receives three million a year. The priest with the monstrance passes by, a woman screams from her stretcher, “I am cured!” Her tuberculosis of the bone continues unchanged.


The door opened a crack. A revolver appeared and an outstretched arm.


Thürheim, II, 35, 28, 37: nothing sweeter than love, nothing pleasanter than flirtation; 45, 48: Jews.



10 February. Eleven o'clock, after a walk. Fresher than usual. Why?

1. Max said I was calm.

2. Felix is going to be married (was angry with him).

3. I remain alone, unless F. will still have me after all.

4. Mrs. X.'s invitation; I think how I shall introduce myself to her.


By chance I walked in the direction opposite to my usual one, that is, Kettensteg, Hradcany, Karlsbrücke. Ordinarily I nearly collapse on this road; today, coming from the opposite direction, I felt somewhat lifted up.



11 February. Hastily read through Dilthey's Goethe; tumultuous impression, carries one along, why couldn't one set oneself afire and be destroyed in the flames? Or obey, even if one hears no command? Or sit on a chair in the middle of one's empty room and look at the floor? Or shout “Forward!” in a mountain defile and hear answering shouts and see people emerge from all the bypaths in the cliffs.



13 February. Yesterday at Mrs. X.'s. Calm and energetic, an energy that is perfect, triumphant, penetrating, that finds its way into everything with eyes, hands, and feet. Her frankness, a frank gaze. I keep remembering the ugly, huge, ceremonious Renaissance hats with ostrich feathers that she used to wear; she repelled me so long as I didn't know her personally. How her muff, when she hurries towards the point of her story, is pressed against her body and yet twitches. Her children, A. and B.


Reminds one a good deal of W. in her looks, in her self-forgetfulness in the story, in her complete absorption, in her small, lively body, even in her hard, hollow voice, in her talk of fine clothes and hats at the same time that she herself wears nothing of the sort.


View from the window of the river. At many points in the conversation, in spite of the fact that she never allows it to flag, my complete failure, vacant gaze, incomprehension of what she is saying; I mechanically drop the silliest remarks at the same time that I am forced to see how closely she attends to them; I stupidly pet her little child.


Dreams: In Berlin, through the streets to her house, calm and happy in the knowledge that, though I haven't arrived at her house yet, a slight possibility of doing so exists; I shall certainly arrive there. I see the streets, on a white house a sign, something like “The Splendors of the North” (saw it in the paper yesterday); in my dream “Berlin W” has been added to it. Ask the way of an affable, red-nosed old policeman who in this instance is stuffed into a sort of butler's livery. Am givers excessively detailed directions, he even points out the railing of a small park in the distance which I must keep hold of for safety's sake when I go past. Then advice about the tram-car, the U-Bahn, etc. I can't follow him any longer and ask in a fright, knowing full well that I am underestimating the distance: “That's about half an hour away?” But the old man answers, “I can make it in six minutes.” What joy! Some man, a shadow, a companion, is always at my side, I don't know who it is. Really have no time to turn around, to turn sideways.


Live in Berlin in some pension or other apparently filled with young Polish Jews; very small rooms. I spill a bottle of water. One of them is tapping incessantly on a small typewriter, barely turns his head when he is asked for something. Impossible to lay hands on a map of Berlin. In the hand of one of them I continually notice a book that looks like a map. But it always proves to be something entirely different, a list of the Berlin schools, tax statistics, or something of the sort. I don't want to believe it, but, smiling, they prove it to me beyond any doubt.



14 February. There will certainly be no one to blame if I should kill myself, even if the immediate cause should for instance appear to be F.'s behavior. Once, half asleep, I pictured the scene that would ensue if, in anticipation of the end, the letter of farewell in my pocket, I should come to her house, should be rejected as a suitor, lay the letter on the table, go to the balcony, break away from all those who run up to hold me back, and, forcing one hand after another to let go its grip, jump over the ledge. The letter, however, would say that I was jumping off because of F., but that even if my proposal had been accepted nothing essential would have been changed for me. My place is down below, I can find no other solution, F. simply happens to be the one through whom my fate is made manifest; I can't live without her and must jump, yet—and this F. suspects—I couldn't live with her either. Why not use tonight for the purpose, I can already see before me the people talking at the parents' gathering this evening, talking of life and the conditions that have to be created for it—but I cling to abstractions, I live completely entangled in life, I won't do it, I am cold, am sad that a shirt collar is pinching my neck, am damned, gasp for breath in the mist.



15 February. How long this Saturday and Sunday seem in retrospect. Yesterday afternoon I had my hair cut, then wrote the letter to Bl., then was over at Max's new place for a moment, then the parents' gathering, sat next to L.W., then Baum (met Kr. in the tram), then on the way home Max's complaints about my silence, then my longing for suicide, then my sister returned from the parents' gathering unable to report the least thing. In bed until ten, sleepless, sorrow after sorrow. No letter, not here, not in the office, mailed a letter to Bl. at the Franz-Josef station, saw G. in the afternoon, walked along the Moldau, read aloud at his house; his queer mother who ate sandwiches and played solitaire; walked around alone for two hours; decided to leave Berlin Friday, met Kohl, at home with my brothers-in-law and sisters, then the discussion of his engagement at Weltsch's (J. K.'s putting out the candles), then at home attempted by my silence to elicit aid and sympathy from my mother; now my sister tells me about her meeting, the clock strikes a quarter to twelve.


At Weltsch's, in order to comfort his mother who was upset, I said: “I too am losing Felix by this marriage. A friend who is married is none.” Felix said nothing, naturally couldn't say anything, but he didn't even want to.


The notebook begins with F., who on 2 May 1913 made me feel uncertain; this same beginning can serve as conclusion too, if in place of “uncertain” I use a worse word.



16 February. Wasted day. My only joy was the hope that last night has given me of sleeping better.


I was going home in my usual fashion in the evening after work, when, as though I had been watched for, they excitedly waved to me from all three windows of the Genzmer house to come up.



22 February. In spite of my drowsy head, whose upper left side is near aching with restlessness, perhaps I am still able quietly to build up some greater whole wherein I might forget everything and be conscious only of the good in one.


Director at his table. Servant brings in a card.

DIRECTOR: Witte again, this is a nuisance, the man is a nuisance.



23 February. I am on my way. Letter from Musil. Pleases me and depresses me, for I have nothing.


A young man on a beautiful horse rides out of the gate of a villa.



8 March. A prince can wed the Sleeping Beauty, or someone even harder to win too, but the Sleeping Beauty can be no prince.


It happened that when Grandmother died only the nurse was with her. She said that just before Grandmother died she lifted herself up a little from the pillow so that she seemed to be looking for someone, and then peacefully lay back again and died.


There is no doubt that I am hemmed in all around, though by something that has certainly not yet fixed itself in my flesh, that I occasionally feel slackening, and that could be burst asunder. There are two remedies, marriage or Berlin; the second is surer, the first more immediately attractive. I dived down and soon everything felt fine. A small shoal floated by in an upwards-mounting chain and disappeared in the green. Bells borne back and forth by the drifting of the tide—wrong.



9 March. Rense walked a few steps down the dim passageway, opened the little papered door of the dining-room, and said to the noisy company, almost without regarding them: “Please be a little more quiet. I have a guest. Have some consideration.”


As he was returning to his room and heard the noise continuing unabated, he halted a moment, was on the verge of going back again, but thought better of it and returned to his room.


A boy of eighteen was standing at the window, looking down into the yard. “It is quieter now,” he said when Rense entered, and lifted his long nose and deep-set eyes to him.


“It isn't quieter at all,” said Rense, taking a swallow from the bottle of beer standing on the table. “It's impossible ever to have any quiet here. You'll have to get used to that, boy.”


I am too tired, I must try to rest and sleep, otherwise I am lost in every respect. What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require the expenditure of so much strength.


The general argument: I am completely lost in F.


Rense, a student, sat studying in his small back room. The maid came in and announced that a young man wished to speak to him. “What is his name?” Rense asked. The maid did not know.


I shall never forget F. in this place, therefore shan't marry. Is that definite?


Yes, that much I can judge of: I am almost thirty-one years old, have known F. for almost two years, must therefore have some perspective by now. Besides, my way of life here is such that I can't forget, even if F. didn't have such significance for me. The uniformity, regularity, comfort, and dependence of my way of life keep me unresistingly fixed wherever I happen to be. Moreover, I have a more than ordinary inclination toward a comfortable and dependent life, and so even strengthen everything that is pernicious to me. Finally, I am getting older, any change becomes more and more difficult. But in all this I foresee a great misfortune for myself, one without end and without hope; I should be dragging through the years up the ladder of my job, growing ever sadder and more alone as long as I could endure it at all.


But you wanted that sort of life for yourself, didn't you?


An official's life could benefit me if I were married. It would in every way be a support to me against society, against my wife, against writing, without demanding too many sacrifices, and without on the other hand degenerating into indolence and dependence, for as a married man I should not have to fear that. But I cannot live out such a life as a bachelor.


But you could have married, couldn't you?


I couldn't marry then; everything in me revolted against it, much as I always loved F. It was chiefly concern over my literary work that prevented me, for I thought marriage would jeopardize it. I may have been right, but in any case it is destroyed by my present bachelor's life. I have written nothing for a year, nor shall I be able to write anything in the future; in my head there is and remains the one single thought, and I am devoured by it. I wasn't able to consider it all at the time. Moreover, as a result of my dependence, which is at least encouraged by this way of life, I approach everything hesitantly and complete nothing at the first stroke. That was what happened here too.


Why do you give up all hope eventually of having F.?


I have already tried every kind of self-humiliation. In the Tiergarten I once said: “Say ‘yes’; even if you consider your feeling for me insufficient to warrant marriage, my love for you is great enough to make up the insufficiency, and strong enough in general to take everything on itself.” In the course of a long correspondence I had alarmed F. by my peculiarities, and these now seemed to make her uneasy. I said: “I love you enough to rid myself of anything that might trouble you. I will become another person.” Now, when everything must be cleared up, I can confess that even at the time when our relationship was at its most affectionate, I often had forebodings and fears, founded on trifling occurrences, that F. did not love me very much, not with all the force of the love she was capable of. F. has now realized this too, though not without my assistance. I am almost afraid that after my last two visits F. even feels a certain disgust for me, despite the fact that outwardly we are friendly, call each other “Du,” walk arm in arm together. The last thing I remember of her is the quite hostile grimace she made in the entrance hall of her house when I was not satisfied to kiss her glove but pulled it open and kissed her hand. Added to this there is the fact that, despite her promise to be punctual in the future in her correspondence, she hasn't answered two of my letters, merely telegraphed to promise letters but hasn't kept her promise; indeed, she hasn't even so much as answered my mother. There can be no doubt of the hopelessness in all this.


One should really never say that. Didn't your previous behavior likewise seem hopeless from F.'s point of view?


That was something else. I always freely confessed my love for her, even during what appeared to be our final farewell in the summer; I was never so cruelly silent; I had reasons for my behavior which, if they could not be approved, could yet be discussed. F.'s only reason is the complete insufficiency of her love. Nevertheless, it is true that I could wait. But I cannot wait in double hopelessness: I cannot see F. more and more slipping from my grasp, and myself more and more unable to escape. It would be the greatest gamble I could take with myself, although—or because—it would best suit all the overpowering evil forces within me. “You never know what will happen” is no argument against the intolerableness of an existing state of affairs.


Then what do you want to do?


Leave Prague. Counter the greatest personal injury that has ever befallen me with the strongest antidote at my disposal.


Leave your job?


In light of the above, my job is only a part of the general intolerableness. I should be losing only what is intolerable in any case. The security, the lifelong provision, the good salary, the fact that it doesn't demand all my strength—after all, so long as I am a bachelor all these things mean nothing to me and are transformed into torments.


Then what do you want to do?


I could answer all such questions at once by saying: I have nothing to lose; every day, each tiniest success, is a gift; whatever I do is all to the good. But I can also give a more precise answer: as an Austrian lawyer, which, speaking seriously, I of course am not, I have no prospects; the best thing I might achieve for myself in this direction I already possess in my present post, and it is of no use to me. Moreover, in the quite impossible event I should want to make some money out of my legal training, there are only two cities that could be considered: Prague, which I must leave, and Vienna, which I hate and where I should inevitably grow unhappy because I should go there with the deepest conviction of that inevitability. I therefore have to leave Austria and—since I have no talent for languages and would do poorly at physical labor or at a business job—go to Germany, at least at first, and in Germany to Berlin, where the chances of earning a living are best. Also, there, in journalism, I can make best and directest use of my ability to write, and so find a means of livelihood at least partially suited to me. Whether in addition I shall be capable of inspired work, that I cannot say at present with any degree of certainty. But I think I know definitely that from the independence and freedom I should have in Berlin (however miserable I otherwise would be) I should derive the only feeling of happiness I am still able to experience.


But you are spoiled.


No, I need a room and a vegetarian diet, almost nothing more.


Aren't you going there because of F.?


No, I choose Berlin only for the above reasons, although I love it and perhaps I love it because of F. and because of the aura of thoughts that surrounds F.; but that I can't help. It is also probable that I shall meet F. in Berlin. If our being together will help me to get F. out of my blood, so much the better, it is an additional advantage Berlin has.


Are you healthy?


No—heart, sleep, digestion.


[A small furnished room. Dawn. Disorder. The student is in bed asleep, his face to the wall. There is a knock at the door. Silence. A louder knock. The student sits up in fright, looks at the door.]

STUDENT: Come in.

MAID [a frail girl]: Good morning.

STUDENT: What do you want? It's still night.

MAID: Excuse me, but a gentleman is asking for you.

STUDENT: For me? [Hesitates] Nonsense! Where is he?

MAID: He is waiting in the kitchen.

STUDENT: What does he look like?

MAID [smiling]: Well, he's still a boy, he's not very handsome; I think he's a Yid.

STUDENT: And that wants to see me in the middle of the night? But I don't need your opinion of my guests, do you hear? Send him in. Be quick about it.

[The student fills the small pipe lying on the chair beside his bed and smokes it.

KLEIPE stands at the door and looks at the student, who calmly smokes on with his eyes turned towards the ceiling. Short, erect, a large, long, somewhat crooked, pointed nose, dark complexion, deep-set eyes, long arms.]

STUDENT: How much longer? Come over here to the bed and say what you want. Who are you? What do you want? Quick! Quick!

KLEIPE [walks very slowly towards the bed and at the same time attempts to gesture something in explanation. He stretches his neck and raises and lowers his eyebrows to assist his speech]: What I mean to say is, I am from Wulfenshausen too.

STUDENT: Really? That's nice, that's very nice. Then why didn't you stay there?

KLEIPE: Only think! It is the home town of both of us, a beautiful place, but still a miserable hole.


It was Sunday afternoon, they lay in bed in one another's arms. It was winter, the room was unheated, they lay beneath a heavy feather quilt.



15 March. The students wanted to carry Dostoyevsky's chains behind his coffin. He died in the workers' quarter, on the fifth floor of a tenement house.


Once, during the winter, at about five o'clock in the morning, the half-clothed maid announced a visitor to the student. “What's that? What did you say?” the student, still half asleep, was asking, when a young man entered, carrying a lighted candle that he had borrowed from the maid. He raised the candle in one hand the better to see the student and lowered his hat in his other hand almost to the floor, so long was his arm.


Only this everlasting waiting, eternal helplessness.



17 March. Sat in the room with my parents, leafed through magazines for two hours, on and off simply stared before me; in general simply waited for ten o'clock to arrive and for me to be able to go to bed.



27 March. On the whole passed in much the same way.


Hass hurried to get aboard the ship, ran across the gangplank, climbed up on deck, sat down in a corner, pressed his hands to his face and from then on no longer concerned himself with anyone. The ship's bell sounded, people were running along, far off, as though at the other end of the ship someone were singing with full voice.


They were just about to pull in the gangplank when a small black carriage came along, the coachman shouted from the distance, he had to exert all his strength to hold back the rearing horse; a young man sprang out of the carriage, kissed an old, white-bearded gentleman bending forward under the roof of the carriage, and with a small valise in his hand ran aboard the ship, which at once pushed off from the shore.


It was about three o'clock in the morning, but in the summer, and already half light. Herr von Irmenhof's five horses Famos, Grasaffe, Tournemento, Rosina and Brabant—rose up in the stable. Because of the sultry night the stable door had been left ajar; the two grooms slept on their backs in the straw, flies hovered up and down above their open mouths, there was nothing to hinder them. Grasaffe stood up so that he straddled the two men under him, and, watching their faces, was ready to strike down at them with his hoofs at their slightest sign of awakening. Meanwhile the four others sprang out of the stable in two easy leaps, one behind the other; Grasaffe followed them.


Through the glass door Anna saw the lodger's room was dark; she went in and turned on the electric light to make the bed ready for the night. But the student was sitting half reclined upon the sofa, smiling at her. She excused herself and turned to leave. But the student asked her to stay and to pay no attention to him. She did stay, in fact, and did her work, casting an occasional sidelong glance at the student.



5 April. If only it were possible to go to Berlin, to become independent, to live from one day to the next, even to go hungry, but to let all one's strength pour forth instead of husbanding it here, or rather instead of one's turning aside into nothingness! If only F. wanted it, would help me!



8 April. Yesterday incapable of writing even one word. Today no better. Who will save me? And the turmoil in me, deep down, scarcely visible; I am like a living lattice-work, a lattice that is solidly planted and would like to tumble down.


Today in the coffeehouse with Werfel. How he looked from the distance, seated at the coffeehouse table. Stooped, half reclining even in the wooden chair, the beautiful profile of his face pressed against his chest, his face almost wheezing in its fullness (not really fat); entirely indifferent to the surroundings, impudent, and without flaw. His dangling glasses by contrast make it easier to trace the delicate outlines of his face.



6 May. My parents seem to have found a beautiful apartment for F. and me; I ran around for nothing one entire beautiful afternoon. I wonder whether they will lay me in my grave too, after a life made happy by their solicitude.


A nobleman, Herr von Griesenau by name, had a coachman, Joseph, whom no other employer would have put up with. He lived in a ground floor room near the gatekeeper's lodge, for he was too fat and short of breath to climb stairs. All he had to do was drive a coach, but even for this he was employed only on special occasions, to honor a visitor perhaps; otherwise, for days on end, for weeks on end, he lay on a couch near the window, with remarkable rapidity blinking his small eyes deep-sunken in fat as he looked out of the window at the trees which—


Joseph the coachman lay on his couch, sat up only in order to take a slice of bread and butter and herring from a little table, then sank back again and stared vacantly around as he chewed. He laboriously sucked in the air through his large round nostrils; sometimes, in order to breathe in enough air, he had to stop chewing and open his mouth; his large belly trembled without stop under the many folds of his thin, dark blue suit.


The window was open, an acacia tree and an empty square were visible through it. It was a low ground floor window. Joseph saw everything from his couch and everybody on the outside could see him. It was annoying, but he hadn't been able to climb stairs for the last six months at least, ever since he had got so fat, and thus was obliged to live on a lower story. When he had first been given this room near the park keeper's lodge, he had pressed and kissed the hands of his employer, Herr von Griesenau, with tears in his eyes, but now he knew its disadvantages: the eternal observation he was subjected to, the proximity of the unpleasant gatekeeper, all the commotion at the entrance gate and on the square, the great distance from the rest of the servants and the consequent estrangement and neglect that he suffered—he was now thoroughly acquainted with all these disadvantages and in fact intended to petition the Master to permit him to move back to his old room. What after all were all these newly hired fellows standing uselessly around for, especially since the Master's engagement? Let them simply carry him up and down the stairs, rare and deserving man that he was.


An engagement was being celebrated. The banquet was at an end, the company got up from the table; all the windows were open, it was a warm and beautiful evening in June. The fiancée stood in a circle of friends and acquaintances, the others were gathered in small groups; now and then there was an outburst of laughter. The man to whom she was engaged stood apart, leaning in the doorway to the balcony and looking out.


After some time the mother of the fiancée noticed him, went over to him and said: “Why are you standing here all alone? Aren't you joining Olga? Have you quarreled?”


“No,” he answered, “we haven't quarreled.”


“Very well,” the mother said, “then join your fiancée! Your behaviour is beginning to attract attention.”


The horror in the merely schematic.


The landlady of the rooming house, a decrepit widow dressed in black and wearing a straight skirt, stood in the middle room of her empty house. It was still perfectly quiet, the bell did not stir. The street, too, was quiet; the woman had purposely chosen so quiet a street because she wanted good roomers, and those who insist on quiet are the best.



27 May. Mother and sister in Berlin. I shall be alone with my father in the evening. I think he is afraid to come up. Should I play cards [Karten] with him? (I find the letter K offensive, almost disgusting, and yet I use it; it must be very characteristic of me.) How Father acted when I touched F.


The first appearance of the white horse was on an autumn afternoon, in a large but not very busy street in the city of A. It passed through the entranceway of a house in whose yard a trucking company had extensive storerooms; thus it would often happen that teams of horses, now and then a single horse as well, had to be led out through the entranceway, and for this reason the white horse attracted little attention. It was not, however, one of the horses belonging to the trucking company. A workman tightening the cords around a bale of goods in front of the gate noticed the horse, looked up from his work, and then into the yard to see whether the coachman was following after. No one came. The horse had hardly stepped into the road when it reared up mightily, struck several sparks from the pavement, for a moment was on the point of falling, but at once regained its balance, and then trotted neither rapidly nor slowly up the street, which was almost deserted at this twilight hour. The workman cursed what he thought had been the carelessness of the coachmen, shouted several names into the yard; some men came out in response, but when they immediately perceived that the horse was not one of theirs, simply stopped short together in the entranceway, somewhat astonished. A short interval elapsed before some of them thought what to do; they ran after the horse for a distance, but, failing to catch sight of it again, soon returned.


In the meantime the horse had already reached the outermost streets of the suburbs without being halted. It accommodated itself to the life of the streets better than horses running alone usually do. Its slow pace could frighten no one, it never strayed out of the roadway or from its own side of the street; when it was obliged to stop for a vehicle coming out of a cross street, it stopped; had the most careful driver been leading it by the halter it could not have behaved more perfectly. Still, of course, it was a conspicuous sight; here and there someone stopped and looked after it with a smile, a coachman in a passing beer wagon jokingly struck down at the horse with his whip; it was frightened, of course, and reared, but did not quicken its pace.


It was just this incident, however, that a policeman saw; he went over to the horse, who at the very last moment had tried to turn off in another direction, took hold of the reins (despite its light frame it wore the harness of a draft horse) and said, though in a friendly way: “Whoa! Now where do you think you are running off to?” He held on to it for some time in the middle of the road, thinking that the animal's owner would soon be along after the runaway.


It has meaning but is weak; its blood flows thin, too far from the heart. There are still some pretty scenes in my head but I will stop regardless. Yesterday the white horse appeared to me for the first time before I fell asleep; I have an impression of its first stepping out of my head, which was turned to the wall, jumping across me and down from the bed, and then disappearing. The last is unfortunately not refuted by the fact of my having begun the story.


If I am not very much mistaken, I am coming closer. It is as though the spiritual battle were taking place in a clearing somewhere in the woods. I make my way into the woods, find nothing, and out of weakness immediately hasten out again; often as I leave the woods I hear, or I think I hear, the clashing weapons of that battle. Perhaps the eyes of the warriors are seeking me through the darkness of the woods, but I know so little of them, and that little is deceptive.


A heavy downpour. Stand and face the rain, let its iron rays pierce you; drift with the water that wants to sweep you away but yet stand fast, and upright in this way abide the sudden and endless shining of the sun.


The landlady dropped her skirts and hurried through the rooms. A cold, haughty woman. Her projecting lower jaw frightened roomers away. They ran down the steps, and when she looked after them through the window they covered their faces as they ran. Once a gentleman came for a room, a solid, thickset young man who constantly kept his hands in his coat pockets. It was a habit, perhaps, but it was also possible that he wanted to conceal the trembling of his hands.


“Young man,” said the woman, and her lower jaw jutted forward, “you want to live here?”


“Yes,” the young man said, tossing his head upward.


“You will like it here,” the woman said, leading him to a chair on which she sat him down. In doing this she noticed a stain on his trousers, kneeled down beside him and began to scrape at the stain with her fingernails.


“You're a dirty fellow,” she said.


“It's an old stain.”


“Then you are an old dirty fellow.”


“Take your hand away,” he said suddenly, and actually pushed her away. “What horrible hands you have.” He caught her hand and turned it over. “All black on top, whitish below, but still black enough and”—he ran his fingers inside her wide sleeve—“there is even some hair on your arm.”


“You're tickling me,” she said.


“Because I like you. I don't understand how they can say that you are ugly. Because they did say it. But now I see that it isn't true at all.”


And he stood up and walked up and down the room. She remained on her knees and looked at her hand.


For some reason this made him furious; he sprang to her side and caught her hand again.


“You're quite a woman,” he then said, and clapped her long thin cheek. “It would really add to my comfort to live here. But it would have to be cheap. And you would not be allowed to take in other roomers. And you would have to be faithful to me. I am really much younger than you and can after all insist on faithfulness. And you would have to cook well. I am used to good food and never intend to disaccustom myself.”


Dance on, you pigs; what concern is it of mine?


But it has more reality than anything I have written this past year. Perhaps after all it is a matter of loosening the joint. I shall once more be able to write.


Every evening for the past week my neighbor in the adjoining room has come to wrestle with me. He was a stranger to me, even now I haven't yet spoken to him. We merely shout a few exclamations at one another, you can't call that “speaking.” With a “well then” the struggle is begun; “scoundrel!” one of us sometimes groans under the grip of the other; “there” accompanies a surprise thrust; “stop!” means the end, yet the struggle always goes on a little while longer. As a rule, even when he is already at the door he leaps back again and gives me a push that sends me to the ground. From his room he then calls good night to me through the wall. If I wanted to give up this acquaintance once and for all I should have to give up my room, for bolting the door is of no avail. Once I had the door bolted because I wanted to read, but my neighbor hacked the door in two with an axe, and, since he can part with something only with the greatest difficulty once he has taken hold of it, I was even in danger of the axe.


I know how to accommodate myself to circumstances. Since he always comes to me at a certain hour, I take up some easy work beforehand which I can interrupt at once, should it be necessary. I straighten out a chest, for example, or copy something, or read some unimportant book. I have to arrange matters in this way—no sooner has he appeared in the door than I must drop everything, slam the chest to at once, drop the penholder, throw the book away, for it is only fighting that he wants, nothing else. If I feel particularly strong I tease him a little by first attempting to elude him. I crawl under the table, throw chairs under his feet, wink at him from the distance, though it is of course in bad taste to joke in this very one-sided way with a stranger. But usually our bodies close in battle at once. Apparently he is a student, studies all day, and wants some hasty exercise in the evening before he goes to bed. Well, in me he has a good opponent; accidents aside, I perhaps am the stronger and more skilful of the two. He, however, has more endurance.



28 May. Day after tomorrow I leave for Berlin. In spite of insomnia, headaches, and worries, perhaps in a better state than ever before.


Once he brought a girl along. While I say hello to her, not watching him, he springs upon me and jerks me into the air. “I protest,” I cried, and raised my hand.


“Keep quiet,” he whispered in my ear. I saw that he was determined to win at all costs, even by resorting to unfair holds, so that he might shine before the girl.


“He said ‘Keep quiet’ to me,” I cried, turning my head to the girl.


“Wretch!” the man gasped in a low voice, exerting all his strength against me. In spite of everything he was able to drag me to the sofa, put me down on it, knelt on my back, paused to regain his breath, and said: “Well, there he lies.”


“Just let him try it again,” I intended to say, but after the very first word he pressed my face so hard into the upholstery that I was forced to be silent.


“Well then,” said the girl, who had sat down at my table and was reading a half-finished letter lying there, “shouldn't we leave now? He has just begun to write a letter.”


“He won't go on with it if we leave. Come over here, will you? Touch him, here on his thigh, for instance; he's trembling just like a sick animal.”


“I say leave him alone and come along.” Very reluctantly the man crawled off me. I could have thrashed him soundly then, for I was rested while all his muscles had been tensed in the effort to hold me down. He was the one who had been trembling and had thought that it was me. I was still trembling even now. But I let him alone because the girl was present.


“You will probably have drawn your own conclusions as to this battle,” I said to the girl, walked by him with a bow and sat down at the table to go on with the letter. “And who is trembling?” I asked, before beginning to write, and held the penholder rigid in the air in proof that it was not me. I was already in the midst of my writing when I called out a short adieu to them in the distance, but kicked out my foot a little to indicate, at least to myself, the farewell that they both probably deserved.



29 May. Tomorrow to Berlin. Is it a nervous or a real, trustworthy security that I feel? How is that possible? Is it true that if one once acquires a confidence in one's ability to write, nothing can miscarry, nothing is wholly lost, while at the same time only seldom will something rise up to a more than ordinary height? Is this because of my approaching marriage to F.? Strange condition, though not entirely unknown to me when I think back.


Stood a long time before the gate with Pick. Thought only of how I might quickly make my escape, for my supper of strawberries was ready for me upstairs. Everything that I shall now note down about him is simply a piece of shabbiness on my part, for I won't let him see any of it, or am content that he won't see it. But I am really an accessory to his behavior so long as I go about in his company, and therefore what I say of him applies as well to me, even if one discounts the pretended subtlety that lies in such a remark.


I make plans. I stare rigidly ahead lest my eyes lose the imaginary peepholes of the imaginary kaleidoscope into which I am looking. I mix noble and selfish intentions in confusion; the color of the noble ones is washed away, in recompense passing off on to the merely selfish ones. I invite heaven and earth to take part in my schemes, at the same time I am careful not to forget the insignificant little people one can draw out of every side street and who for the time being are more useful to my schemes. It is of course only the beginning, always only the beginning. But as I stand here in my misery, already the huge wagon of my schemes comes driving up behind me, I feel underfoot the first small step up, naked girls, like those on the carnival floats of happier countries, lead me backwards up the steps; I float because the girls float, and raise my hand to command silence. Rose bushes stand at my side, incense burns, laurel wreaths are let down, flowers are strewn before and over me; two trumpeters, as if hewn out of stone, blow fanfares, throngs of little people come running up, in ranks behind leaders; the bright, empty, open squares become dark, tempestuous, and crowded; I feel myself at the farthest edge of human endeavor, and, high up where I am, with suddenly acquired skill spontaneously execute a trick I had admired in a contortionist years ago—I bend slowly backwards (at that very moment the heavens strain to open to disclose a vision of me, but then stop), draw my head and trunk through my legs, and gradually stand erect again. Was this the ultimate given to mankind? It would seem so, for already I see the small horned devils leaping out of all the gates of the land, which lies broad and deep beneath me, overrunning the countryside; everything gives way in the center under their feet, their little tails expunge everything, fifty devils' tails are already scouring my face; the ground begins to yield, first one of my feet sinks in and then the other; the screams of the girls pursue me into the depths into which I plummet, down a shaft precisely the width of my body but infinitely deep. This infinity tempts one to no extraordinary accomplishments, anything that I should do would be insignificant; I fall insensibly and that is best.


Dostoyevsky's letter to his brother on life in prison.



6 June. Back from Berlin. Was tied hand and foot like a criminal. Had they sat me down in a corner bound in real chains, placed policemen in front of me, and let me look on simply like that, it could not have been worse. And that was my engagement; everybody made an effort to bring me to life, and when they couldn't, to put up with me as I was. F. least of all, of course, with complete justification, for she suffered the most. What was merely a passing occurrence to the others, to her was a threat.


We couldn't bear it at home even a moment. We knew that they would look for us. But despite its being evening we ran away. Hills encircled our city; we clambered up them. We set all the trees to shaking as we swung down the slope from one end to the other.


The posture of the clerks in the store shortly before closing time in the evening: hands in trouser pockets, a trifle stooped, looking from the vaulted interior past the open door on to the square. Their tired movements behind the counters. Weakly tie up a package, distractedly dust a few boxes, pile up used wrapping paper.


An acquaintance comes and speaks to me. He makes the following statement: Some say this, but I say exactly the opposite. He cites the reasons for his opinion. I wonder. My hands lie in my trouser pockets as if they had been dropped there, and yet as relaxed as if I had only to turn my pockets inside out and they would quickly drop out again.


I had closed the store, employees and customers departed carrying their hats in hand. It was a June evening, eight o'clock already but still light. I had no desire to take a walk, I never feel an inclination to go walking; but neither did I want to go home. When my last apprentice had turned the corner I sat down on the ground in front of the closed store.


An acquaintance and his young wife came by and saw me sitting on the ground. “Why, look who is sitting here,” he said. They stopped, and the man shook me a little, despite the fact that I had been calmly regarding him from the very first.


“My God, why are you sitting here like this?” his young wife asked.


“I am going to give up my store,” I said. “It isn't going too badly, and I can meet all my obligations, even if only just about. But I can't stand the worries, I can't control the clerks, I can't talk to the customers. From tomorrow on I won't even open the store. I've thought it all over carefully.” I saw how the man sought to calm his wife by taking her hand between both of his.


“Fine,” he said, “you want to give up your store; you aren't the first to do it. We too”—he looked across at his wife—“as soon as we have enough to take care of ourselves (may it be soon), won't hesitate to give up our store any more than you have done. Business is as little a pleasure to us as it is to you, believe me. But why do you sit on the ground?”


“Where shall I go?” I said. Of course, I knew why they were questioning me. It was sympathy and astonishment as well as embarrassment that they felt, but I was in no position whatsoever to help them too.


“Don't you want to join us?” I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. “No, I don't,” I said.


It was already past midnight. I sat in my room writing a letter on which a lot depended for me, for with the letter I hoped to secure an excellent post abroad. I sought to remind the acquaintance to whom I was writing—by chance, after a ten-year interval, I had been put in touch with him again by a common friend—of past times, and at the same time make him understand that all my circumstances pressed me to leave the country and that in the absence of good and far-reaching connections of my own, I was placing my greatest hopes in him.


It was getting on towards nine o'clock in the evening before Bruder, a city official, came home from his office. It was already quite dark. His wife was waiting for him in front of the gate, clutching her little girl to her. “How is it going?” she asked.


“Very badly,” said Bruder. “Come into the house and I'll tell you everything.” The moment they set foot in the house, Bruder locked the front door. “Where is the maid?” he asked.


“In the kitchen,” his wife replied.


“Good; come!”


The table lamp was lit in the large, low living room, they all sat down, and Bruder said: “Well, this is how things stand. Our men are in full retreat. As I understand it from unimpeachable reports that have been received at City Hall, the fighting at Rumdorf has gone entirely against us. Moreover, the greater part of the troops have already withdrawn from the city. They are still keeping it secret so as not to add enormously to the panic in the city; I don't consider that altogether wise, it would be better to tell the truth frankly. However, my duty demands that I be silent. But of course there is no one to prevent me from telling you the truth. Besides, everybody suspects the real situation, you can see that everywhere. Everybody is shutting up his house, hiding whatever can be hidden.”


It was about ten o'clock in the evening before Bruder, a city official, came home from his office; nevertheless he at once knocked on the door that separated his room from Rumford's, the furniture dealer, from whom he rented the room. Though he could hear only an indistinct response, he went in. Rumford was seated at the table with a newspaper; his fat was troubling him this hot July evening, he had thrown his coat and vest on the sofa; his shirt—


Several city officials were standing by the stone ledge of a window in City Hall, looking down into the square. The last of the rearguard was waiting below for the command to retreat. They were young, tall, red-cheeked fellows who held their quivering horses tightly reined. Two officers rode slowly back and forth in front of them. They were apparently waiting for a report. They sent out numerous riders who disappeared at a gallop up a steeply ascending side-street opening off the square. None had yet returned.


The city official Bruder, still a young man but wearing a full beard, had joined the group at the window. Since he enjoyed higher rank and was held in particular esteem because of his abilities, they all bowed courteously and made way for him at the window ledge. “This must be the end,” he said, looking down on the square. “It is only too apparent.”


“Then it is your opinion, Councillor,” said an arrogant young man who in spite of Bruder's approach had not stirred from his place and now stood close to him in such a way that it was impossible for them to look at each other; “then it is your opinion that the battle has been lost?”


“Certainly. There can be no doubt of it. Speaking in confidence, our leadership is bad. We must pay for all sorts of old sins. This of course is not the time to talk of it, everybody must look out for himself now. We are indeed face to face with final collapse. Our visitors may be here by this evening. It may be that they won't even wait until evening but will arrive here in half an hour.”


I step out of the house for a short stroll. The weather is beautiful but the street is startlingly empty, except for a municipal employee in the distance who is holding a hose and playing a huge arc of water along the street. “Unheard of,” I say, and test the tension of the arc. “An insignificant municipal employee,” I say, and again look at the man in the distance.


At the corner of the next intersection two men are fighting; they collide, fly far apart, guardedly approach one another and are at once locked together in struggle again. “Stop fighting, gentlemen,” I say.


The student Kosel was studying at his table. He was so deeply engrossed in his work that he failed to notice it getting dark; in spite of the brightness of the May day, dusk began to descend at about four o'clock in the afternoon in this ill-situated back room. He read with pursed lips, his eyes, without his being aware of it, bent close to the book. Occasionally he paused in his reading, wrote short excerpts from what he had read into a little notebook, and then, closing his eyes, whispered from memory what he had written down. Across from his window, not five yards away, was a kitchen and in it a girl ironing clothes who would often look across at Karl.


Suddenly Kosel put his pencil down and listened. Someone was pacing back and forth in the room above, apparently barefooted, making one round after another. At every step there was a loud splashing noise, of the kind one makes when one steps into water. Kosel shook his head. These walks which he had had to endure for perhaps a week now, ever since a new roomer had moved in, meant the end, not only of his studying for today, but of his studying altogether, unless he did something in his own defense.


There are certain relationships which I can feel distinctly but which I am unable to perceive. It would be sufficient to plunge down a little deeper; but just at this point the upward pressure is so strong that I should think myself at the very bottom if I did not feel the currents moving below me. In any event, I look upward to the surface whence the thousand-times-refracted brilliance of the light falls upon me. I float up and splash around on the surface, in spite of the fact that I loathe everything up there and—


“Herr Direktor, a new actor has arrived,” the servant was heard distinctly to announce, for the door to the anteroom was wide open. “I merely wish to become an actor,” said Karl in an undertone, and in this way corrected the servant's announcement. “Where is he?” the director asked, craning his neck.


The old bachelor with the altered cut to his beard.


The woman dressed in white in the center of the Kinsky Palace courtyard. Distinct shadow under the high arch of her bosom in spite of the distance. Stiffly seated.



11 June.

TEMPTATION IN THE VILLAGE



One summer, towards evening, I arrived in a village where I had never been before. It struck me how broad and open were the paths. Everywhere one saw tall old trees in front of the farmhouses. It had been raining, the air was fresh, everything pleased me. I tried to indicate this by the manner in which I greeted the people standing in front of the gates; their replies were friendly even if somewhat aloof. I thought it would be nice to spend the night here if I could find an inn.


I was just walking past the high ivy-covered wall of a farm when a small door opened in the wall, three faces peered out, vanished, and the door closed again. “Strange,” I said aloud, turning to one side as if I had someone with me. And, as if to embarrass me, there in fact stood a tall man next to me with neither hat nor coat, wearing a black knitted vest and smoking a pipe. I quickly recovered myself and said, as though I had already known that he was there: “The door! Did you see the way that little door opened?”


“Yes,” the man said, “but what's strange in that? It was the tenant farmer's children. They heard your footsteps and looked out to see who was walking by here so late in the evening.”


“The explanation is a simple one, of course,” I said with a smile. “It's easy for things to seem queer to a stranger. Thank you.” And I went on.


But the man followed me. I wasn't really surprised by that, the man could be going the same way; yet there was no reason for us to walk one behind the other and not side by side. I turned and said, “Is this the right way to the inn?”


The man stopped and said, “We don't have an inn, or rather we have one but it can't be lived in. It belongs to the community and, years ago now, after no one had applied for the management of it, it was turned over to an old cripple whom the community already had to provide for. With his wife he now manages the inn, but in such a way that you can hardly pass by the door, the smell coming out of it is so strong. The floor of the parlor is slippery with dirt. A wretched way of doing things, a disgrace to the village, a disgrace to the community.”


I wanted to contradict the man; his appearance provoked me to it, this thin face with yellowish, leathery, bony cheeks and black wrinkles spreading over all of it at every movement of his jaws. “Well,” I said, expressing no further surprise at this state of affairs, and then went on: “I'll stop there anyway, since I have made up my mind to spend the night here.”


“Very well,” the man quickly said, “but this is the path you must take to reach the inn,” and he pointed in the direction I had come from. “Walk to the next corner and then turn right. You'll see the inn sign at once. That's it.”


I thanked him for the information and now walked past him again while he regarded me very closely. I had no way of guarding against the possibility that he had given me wrong directions, but was determined not to be put out of countenance either by his forcing me to march past him now, or by the fact that he had with such remarkable abruptness abandoned his attempts to warn me against the inn. Somebody else could direct me to the inn as well, and if it were dirty, why then for once I would simply sleep in dirt, if only to satisfy my stubbornness. Moreover, I did not have much of a choice; it was already dark, the roads were muddy from the rain, and it was a long way to the next village.


By now the man was behind me and I intended not to trouble myself with him any further when I heard a woman's voice speak to him. I turned. Out of the darkness under a group of plane trees stepped a tall, erect woman. Her skirts shone a yellowish-brown color, over her head and shoulders was a black coarse-knit shawl. “Come home now, won't you?” she said to the man; “why aren't you coming?”


“I'm coming,” he said; “only wait a little while. I want to see what that man is going to do. He's a stranger. He's hanging around here for no reason at all. Look at him.”


He spoke of me as if I were deaf or did not understand his language. Now to be sure it did not much matter to me what he said, but it would naturally be unpleasant for me were he to spread false reports about me in the village, no matter of what kind. For this reason I said to the woman: “I'm looking for the inn, that's all. Your husband has no right to speak of me that way and perhaps give you a wrong impression of me.”


But the woman hardly looked at me and went over to her husband (I had been correct in thinking him her husband; there was such a direct, self-evident relationship between the two), and put her hand on his shoulder: “If there is anything you want, speak to my husband, not to me.”


“But I don't want anything,” I said, irritated by the manner in which I was being treated; “I mind my business, you mind yours. That's all I ask.” The woman tossed her head; that much I was able to make out in the dark, but not the expression in her eyes. Apparently she wanted to say something in reply, but her husband said, “Keep still!” and she was silent.


Our encounter now seemed definitely at an end; I turned, about to go on, when someone called out, “Sir!” It was probably addressed to me. For a moment I could not tell where the voice came from, but then I saw a young man sitting above me on the farmyard wall, his legs dangling down and knees bumping together, who insolently said to me: “I have just heard that you want to spend the night in the village. You won't find liveable quarters anywhere except here on this farm.”


“On this farm?” I asked, and involuntarily—I was furious about it later—cast a questioning glance at the man and wife, who still stood there pressed against each other watching me.


“That's right,” he said, with the same arrogance in his reply that there was in all his behavior.


“Are there beds to be had here?” I asked again, to make sure and to force the man back into his role of landlord.


“Yes,” he said, already averting his glance from me a little, “beds for the night are furnished here, not to everyone, but only to those to whom they are offered.”


“I accept,” I said, “but will naturally pay for the bed, just as I would at the inn.”


“Please,” said the man, who had already been looking over my head for a long time, “we shall not take advantage of you.”


He sat above like a master, I stood down below like a petty servant; I had a great desire to stir him up a little by throwing a stone up at him. Instead I said, “Then please open the door for me.”


“It's not locked,” he said.


“It's not locked,” I grumbled in reply, almost without knowing it, opened the door, and walked in. I happened to look up at the top of the wall immediately afterwards; the man was no longer there, in spite of its height he had apparently jumped down from the wall and was perhaps discussing something with the man and wife. Let them discuss it, what could happen to me, a young man with barely three gulden in cash and the rest of whose property consisted of not much more than a clean shirt in his rucksack and a revolver in his trouser pocket. Besides, the people did not look at all as if they would rob anyone. But what else could they want of me?


It was the usual sort of neglected garden found on large farms, though the solid stone wall would have led one to expect more. In the tall grass, at regular intervals, stood cherry trees with fallen blossoms. In the distance one could see the farmhouse, a one-story rambling structure. It was already growing quite dark; I was a late guest; if the man on the wall had lied to me in any way, I might find myself in an unpleasant situation. On my way to the house I met no one, but when a few steps away from the house I saw, in the room into which the open door gave, two tall old people side by side, a man and wife their faces towards thc door, eating some sort of porridge out of a bowl. I could not make anything out very clearly in the darkness but now and then something on the man's coat sparkled like gold, it was probably his buttons or perhaps his watch chain.


I greeted them and then said, not crossing the threshold for the moment: “I happened to be looking in the village for a place to spend the night when a young man sitting on your garden wall told me it was possible to rent a room for the night here on the farm.” The two old people had put their spoons into the porridge, leaned back on their bench, and looked at me in silence. There was none too great hospitality in their demeanor. I therefore added, “I hope the information given me was correct and that I haven't needlessly disturbed you.” I said this very loudly, for they might perhaps have been hard of hearing.


“Come nearer,” said the man after a little pause.


I obeyed him only because he was so old, otherwise I should naturally have had to insist that he give a direct answer to my direct question. At any rate, as I entered I said, “If putting me up causes you even the slightest difficulty, feel free to tell me so; I don't absolutely insist on it. I can go to the inn, it wouldn't matter to me at all.”


“He talks so much,” the woman said in a low voice.


It could only have been intended as an insult, thus it was with insults that they met my courtesy; yet she was an old woman, I could not say anything in my defense. And my very defenselessness was perhaps the reason why this remark to which I dared not retort had so much greater an effect on me than it deserved. I felt there was some justification for a reproach of some sort, not because I had talked too much, for as a matter of fact I had said only what was absolutely necessary, but because of other reasons that touched my existence very closely. I said nothing further, insisted on no reply, saw a bench in a dark corner near by, walked over, and sat down.


The old couple resumed their eating, a girl came in from the next room and placed a lighted candle on the table. Now one saw even less than before, everything merged in the darkness, only the tiny flame flickered above the slightly bowed heads of the two old people. Several children came running in from the garden, one fell headlong and cried, the others stopped running and now stood dispersed about the room; the old man said, “Go to sleep, children.”


They gathered in a group at once, the one who had been crying was only sobbing now, one boy near me plucked at my coat as if he meant that I was to come along; since I wanted to go to sleep too, I got up and, adult though I was, went silently from the room in the midst of the children as they loudly chorused good night. The friendly little boy took me by the hand and made it easier for me to find my way in the dark. Very soon we came to a ladder, climbed up it, and were in the attic. Through a small open skylight in the roof one could just then see the thin crescent of the moon; it was delightful to step under the skylight—my head almost reached up to it—and to breathe the mild yet cool air. Straw was piled on the floor against one wall; there was enough room for me to sleep too. The children—there were two boys and three girls—kept laughing while they undressed; I had thrown myself down in my clothes on the straw, I was among strangers, after all, and they were under no obligation to take me in. For a little while, propped up on my elbows, I watched the half-naked children playing in a corner. But then I felt so tired that I put my head on my rucksack, stretched out my arms, let my eyes travel along the roof beams a while longer, and fell asleep. In my first sleep I thought I could still hear one boy shout, “Watch out, he's coming!” whereupon the noise of the hurried tripping of the children running to their beds penetrated my already receding consciousness.


I had surely slept only a very short time, for when I awoke the moonlight still fell almost unchanged through the window on the same part of the floor. I did not know why I had awakened—my sleep had been dreamless and deep. Then near me, at about the height of my ear, I saw a very small bushy dog, one of those repulsive little lap dogs with disproportionately large heads encircled by curly hair, whose eyes and muzzle are loosely set into their heads like ornaments made out of some kind of lifeless horny substance. What was a city dog like this doing in the village! What was it that made it roam the house at night? Why did it stand next to my ear? I hissed at it to make it go away; perhaps it was the children's pet and had simply strayed to my side. It was frightened by my hissing but did not run away, only turned around, then stood there on its crooked little legs and I could see its stunted (especially by contrast with its large head) little body.


Since it continued to stand there quietly, I tried to go back to sleep, but could not; over and over again in the space immediately before my closed eyes I could see the dog rocking back and forth with its protruding eyes. It was unbearable, I could not stand the animal near me; I rose and picked it up in my arms to carry it outside. But though it had been apathetic until then, it now began to defend itself and tried to seize me with its claws. Thus I was forced to hold its little paws fast too—an easy matter, of course; I was able to hold all four in one hand. “So, my pet,” I said to the excited little head with its trembling curls, and went into the dark with it, looking for the door.


Only now did it strike me how silent the little dog was, it neither barked nor squeaked, though I could feel its blood pounding wildly through its arteries. After a few steps—the dog had claimed all my attention and made me careless—greatly to my annoyance, I stumbled over one of the sleeping children. It was now very dark in the attic, only a little light still came through the skylight. The child sighed, I stood still for a moment, dared not move even my toe away lest any change waken the child still more. It was too late; suddenly, all around me, I saw the children rising up in their white shifts as though by agreement, as though on command. It was not my fault; I had made only one child wake up, though it had not really been an awakening at all, only a slight disturbance that a child should have easily slept through. But now they were awake. “What do you want, children?” I asked. “Go back to sleep.”


“You're carrying something,” one of the boys said, and all five children searched my person.


“Yes,” I said; I had nothing to hide, if the children wanted to take the dog out, so much the better. “I'm taking this dog outside. It was keeping me from sleeping. Do you know whose it is?”


“Mrs. Cruster's,” at least that's what I thought I made of their confused, indistinct drowsy shouts which were intended not for me but only for each other.


“Who is Mrs. Cruster?” I asked, but got no further answer from the excited children. One of them took the dog, which had now become entirely still, from my arm and hurried away with it; the rest followed.


I did not want to remain here alone, also my sleepiness had left me by now; for a moment I hesitated, it seemed to me that I was meddling too much in the affairs of this house where no one had shown any great confidence in me; but finally I ran after the children. I heard the pattering of their feet a short distance ahead of me, but often stumbled in the pitch darkness on the unfamiliar way and once even bumped my head painfully against the wall. We came into the room in which I had first met the old people; it was empty, through the door that was still standing open one could see the moonlit garden.


“Go outside,” I said to myself, “the night is warm and bright, you can continue your journey or even spend the night in the open. After all, it is so ridiculous to run about after the children here.” But I ran nevertheless; I still had a hat, stick, and rucksack up in the attic. But how the children ran! With their shifts flying they leaped through the moonlit room in two bounds, as I distinctly saw. It occurred to me that I was giving adequate thanks for the lack of hospitality shown me in this house by frightening the children, causing a race through the house and myself making a great din instead of sleeping (the sound of the children's bare feet could hardly be heard above the tread of my heavy boots)—and I had not the faintest notion of what would come of all this.


Suddenly a bright light appeared. In front of us, in a room with several windows opened wide, a delicate-looking woman sat at a table writing by the light of a tall, splendid table lamp. “Children!” she called out in astonishment; she hadn't seen me yet, I stayed back in the shadow outside the door. The children put the dog on the table; they obviously loved the woman very much, kept trying to look into her eyes, one girl seized her hand and caressed it; she made no objection, was scarcely aware of it. The dog stood before her on the sheet of letter paper on which she had just been writing and stretched out its quivering little tongue toward her, the tongue could be plainly seen a short distance in front of the lampshade. The children now begged to be allowed to remain and tried to wheedle the woman's consent. The woman was undecided, got up, stretched her arms, and pointed to the single bed and the hard floor. Thc children refused to give it any importance and lay down on the floor wherever they happened to be, to try it; for a while everything was quiet. Her hands folded in her lap, the woman looked down with a smile at the children. Now and then one raised its head, but when it saw the others still lying down, lay back again.


One evening I returned home to my room from the office somewhat later than usual—an acquaintance had detained me below at the house entrance for a long time—opened the door (my thoughts were still engrossed by our conversation, which had consisted chiefly of gossip about people's social standing), hung my overcoat on the hook, and was about to cross over to the washstand when I heard a strange, spasmodic breathing. I looked up and, on top of the stove that stood deep in the gloom of a comer, saw something alive. Yellowish glittering eyes stared at me; large round woman's breasts rested on the shelf of the stove, on either side beneath the unrecognizable face; the creature seemed to consist entirely of a mass of soft white flesh; a thick yellowish tail hung down beside the stove, its tip ceaselessly passing back and forth over the cracks of the tiles.


The first thing I did was to cross over with long strides and sunken head—nonsense! I kept repeating like a prayer—to the door that led to my landlady's rooms. Only later I realized that I had entered without knocking. Miss Hefter—


It was about midnight. Five men held me, behind them a sixth had his hand raised to grab me. “Let go,” I cried, and whirled in a circle, making them all fall back. I felt some sort of law at work, had known that this last effort of mine would be successful, saw all the men reeling back with raised arms, realized that in a moment they would all throw themselves on me together, turned towards the house entrance—I was standing only a short distance from it—lifted the latch (it sprang open of itself, as it were, with extraordinary rapidity), and escaped up the dark stairs.


On the top floor stood my old mother in the open doorway of our apartment, a candle in her hand. “Look out! look out!” I cried while still on the floor below, “they are coming after me!”


“Who? Who?” my mother asked. “Who could be coming after you, son?” my mother asked.


“Six men,” I said breathlessly.


“Do you know them?” my mother asked.


“No, strangers,” I said.


“What do they look like?”


“I barely caught a glimpse of them. One has a black full beard, one a large ring on his finger, one has a red belt, one has his trousers torn at the knee, one has only one eye open, and the last bares his teeth.”


“Don't think about it any more,” my mother said. “Go to your room, go to sleep, I've made the bed.”


My mother! This old woman already proof against the assaults of life, with a crafty wrinkle round her mouth, mouth that unwittingly repeated eighty-year-old follies.


“Sleep now?” I cried-—



12 June. Kubin. Yellowish face, sparse hair lying flat on his skull, from time to time a heightened sparkle in his eyes.


W., half blind, detached retina; has to be careful not to fall or be pushed, for the lens might fall out and then it would be all over with. Has to hold the book close to his eyes when he reads and try to catch the letters through the corners of his eyes. Was in India with Melchior Lechter, fell ill with dysentery; eats everything, every piece of fruit he finds lying in the dust of the street.


P. sawed a silver chastity belt off a skeleton; pushed aside the workers who had dug it up somewhere in Romania, reassured them by saying that he saw in the belt a valuable trifle which he wanted as a souvenir, sawed it open and pulled it off. If he finds a valuable Bible or picture or page that he wants in a village church, he tears what he wants out of the book, off the wall, from the altar, puts a two-heller piece down as compensation, and his conscience is clear—Loves fat women. Every woman he has had has been photographed. The bundle of photographs that he shows every visitor. Sits at one end of the sofa, his visitor, at a considerable distance from him, at the other. P. hardly looks across and yet always knows which picture is on top and supplies the necessary explanations: This was an old widow; these were the two Hungarian maids; etc.—Of Kubin: “Yes, Master Kubin, you are indeed on the way up; in ten or twenty years, if this keeps on, you may come to occupy a position like that of Bayros.”


Dostoyevsky's letter to a woman painter.


The life of society moves in a circle. Only those burdened with a common affliction understand each other. Thanks to their affliction they constitute a circle and provide each other mutual support. They glide along the inner borders of their circle, make way for or jostle one another gently in the crowd. Each encourages the other in the hope that it will react upon himself, or—and then it is done passionately—in the immediate enjoyment of this reaction. Each has only that experience which his affliction grants him; nevertheless one hears such comrades exchanging immensely varying experiences. “This is how you are,” one says to the other; “instead of complaining, thank God that this is how you are, for if this were not how you are, you would have this or that misfortune, this or that shame.” How does this man know that? After all, he belongs—his statement betrays it—to the same circle as does the one to whom he spoke; he stands in the same need of comfort. In the same circle, however, one knows only the same things. There exists not the shadow of a thought to give the comforter an advantage over the comforted. Thus their conversations consist only of a coming-together of their imaginations, outpourings of wishes from one upon the other. One will look down at the ground and the other up at a bird; it is in such differences that their intercourse is realized. Sometimes they will unite in faith and, their heads together, look up into the unending reaches of the sky. Recognition of their situation shows itself, however, only when they bow down their heads in common and the common hammer descends upon them.



14 June. How I calmly walk along while my head twitches and a branch feebly rustles overhead, causing me the worst discomfort. I have in me the same calm, the same assurance as other people, but somehow or other inverted.



19 June. The excitement of the last few days. The calm that is transferred from Dr. W. to me. The worries he takes upon himself for me. How they moved back into me early this morning when I awoke about four after a deep sleep. Pištekovo Divadlo. Löwenstein. Now the crude, exciting novel by Soyka. Anxiety. Convinced that I need F.


How the two of us, Ottla and I, explode in rage against every kind of human relationship.


The parents' grave, in which the son (Pollak, a graduate of a commercial school) is also buried.



25 June. I paced up and down my room from early morning until twilight. The window was open, it was a warm day. The noises of the narrow street beat in uninterruptedly. By now I knew every trifle in the room from having looked at it in the course of my pacing up and down. My eyes had traveled over every wall. I had pursued the pattern of the rug to its last convolution, noted every mark of age it bore. My fingers had spanned the table across the middle many times. I had already bared my teeth repeatedly at the picture of the landlady's dead husband.


Towards evening I walked over to the window and sat down on the low sill. Then, for the first time not moving restlessly about, I happened calmly to glance into the interior of the room and at the ceiling. And finally, finally, unless I were mistaken, this room which I had so violently upset began to stir. The tremor began at the edges of the thinly plastered white ceiling. Little pieces of plaster broke off and with a distinct thud fell here and there, as if at random, to the floor. I held out my hand and some plaster fell into it too; in my excitement I threw it over my head into the street without troubling to turn around. The cracks in the ceiling made no pattern yet, but it was already possible somehow to imagine one. But I put these games aside when a bluish violet began to mix with the white; it spread straight out from the center of the ceiling, which itself remained white, even radiantly white, where the shabby electric lamp was stuck. Wave after wave of the color—or was it a light?—spread out towards the now darkening edges. One no longer paid any attention to the plaster that was falling away as if under the pressure of a skillfully applied tool. Yellow and golden-yellow colors now penetrated the violet from the side. But the ceiling did not really take on these different hues; the colors merely made it somewhat transparent; things striving to break through seemed to be hovering above it, already one could almost see the outlines of a movement there, an arm was thrust out, a silver sword swung to and fro. It was meant for me, there was no doubt of that; a vision intended for my liberation was being prepared.


I sprang up on the table to make everything ready, tore out the electric light together with its brass fixture and hurled it to the floor, then jumped down and pushed the table from the middle of the room to the wall. That which was striving to appear could drop down unhindered on the carpet and announce to me whatever it had to announce. I had barely finished when the ceiling did in fact break open. In the dim light, still at a great height, I had judged it badly, an angel in bluish-violet robes girt with gold cords sank slowly down on great white silken-shining wings, the sword in its raised arm thrust out horizontally. “An angel, then!” I thought; “it has been flying towards me all the day and in my disbelief I did not know it. Now it will speak to me.” I lowered my eyes. When I raised them again the angel was still there, it is true, hanging rather far off under the ceiling (which had closed again), but it was no living angel, only a painted wooden figurehead off the prow of some ship, one of the kind that hangs from the ceiling in sailors' taverns, nothing more.


The hilt of the sword was made in such a way as to hold candles and catch the dripping tallow. I had pulled the electric light down; I didn't want to remain in the dark, there was still one candle left, so I got up on a chair, stuck the candle into the hilt of the sword, lit it, and then sat late into the night under the angel's faint flame.



30 June. Hellerau to Leipzig with Pick. I behaved terribly. Couldn't ask a question, answer one, or move; was barely able to look him in the eye. The Navy League agitator, the fat, sausage-eating Thomas couple in whose house we lived, Prescher, who took us there; Mrs. Thomas, Hegner, Fantl and Mrs. Adler, the woman and the child, Anneliese, Mrs. K., Miss P., Mrs. Fantl's sister, K., Mendelssohn (the brother's child; Alpinum, cockchafer larvae, pineneedle bath); tavern in the forest called Natura, Wolff, Haas; reading Narciss aloud in the Adler garden, sightseeing in the Dalcroze house, evening in the tavern in the forest, Bugra—terror after terror.


Failures: didn't find the Natura, ran up and down Struvestrasse; wrong tram to Hellerau; no room in the tavern in the forest; forgot that I was supposed to get a telephone call from E. there, hence went back; Fantl had left; Dalcroze in Geneva; next morning got to the tavern in the forest too late (F. had telephoned for nothing); decided to go not to Berlin but Leipzig; pointless trip; by mistake, a local train; Wolff was just going to Berlin; Lasker-Schüler appropriated Werfel; pointless visit to the exhibition; finally, to cap it all, quite pointlessly dunned Pick for an old debt in the Arco.



1 July. Too tired.



5 July. To have to bear and to be the cause of such suffering!



23 July. The tribunal in the hotel. Trip in the cab. F.'s face. She patted her hair with her hand, wiped her nose, yawned. Suddenly she gathered herself together and said very studied, hostile things she had long been saving up. The trip back with Miss Bl. The room in the hotel; heat reflected from the wall across the street. Afternoon sun, in addition. Energetic waiter, almost an Eastern Jew in his manner. The courtyard noisy as a boiler factory. Bad smells. Bedbug. Crushing is a difficult decision. Chambermaid astonished: There are no bedbugs anywhere; once only did a guest find one in the corridor.


At her parents'. Her mother's occasional tears. I recited my lesson. Her father understood the thing from every side. Made a special trip from Malmö to meet me, traveled all night; sat there in his shirt sleeves. They agreed that I was right, there was nothing, or not much, that could be said against me. Devilish in my innocence. Miss Bl.'s apparent guilt.


Evening alone on a bench on Unter den Linden. Stomachache. Sad-looking ticket-seller. Stood in front of people, shuffled the tickets in his hands, and you could only get rid of him by buying one. Did his job properly in spite of all his apparent clumsiness—on a full-time job of this kind you can't keep jumping around; he must also try to remember people's faces. When I see people of this kind I always think: How did he get into this job, how much does he make, where will he be tomorrow, what awaits him in his old age, where does he live, in what corner does he stretch out his arms before going to sleep, could I do his job, how should I feel about it? All this together with my stomachache. Suffered through a horrible night. And yet almost no recollection of it.


In the Restaurant Belvedere on the Strahlau Brücke with E (Erna Bauer, Felice’s sister). She still hopes it will end well, or acts as if she does. Drank wine. Tears in her eyes. Ships leave for Grünau, for Schwertau. A lot of people. Music. E. consoled me, though I wasn't sad; that is, my sadness has to do only with myself, but as such it is inconsolable. Gave me The Gothic Rooms. Talked a lot (I knew nothing). Especially about how she got her way in her job against a venomous white-haired old woman who worked in the same place. She would like to leave Berlin, to have her own business. She loves quiet. When she was in Sebnitz she often slept all day on Sunday. Can be gay too.


Why did her parents and aunt wave after me? Why did F. sit in the hotel and not stir in spite of the fact that everything was already settled? Why did she telegraph me: “Expecting you, but must leave on business Tuesday?” Was I expected to do something? Nothing could have been more natural. From nothing (interrupted by Dr. Weiss, who walks over to the window)—



27 July. The next day didn't visit her parents again. Merely sent a messenger with a letter of farewell. Letter dishonest and coquettish. “Don't think badly of me.” Speech from the gallows.


Went twice to the swimming pool on the Strahlauer Ufer. Lots of Jews. Bluish faces, strong bodies, wild running. Evening in the garden of the Askanischer Hof. Ate rice à la Trautmannsdorf and a peach. A man drinking wine watched my attempts to cut the unripe little peach with my knife. I couldn't. Stricken with shame under the old man's eyes, I let the peach go completely and ten times leafed through Die Fliegenden Blätter. I waited to see if he wouldn't at last turn away. Finally I collected all my strength and in defiance of him bit into the completely juiceless and expensive peach. A tall man in the booth near me occupied with nothing but the roast he was painstakingly selecting and the wine in the ice bucket. Finally he lit a long cigar; I watched him over my Fliegende Blätter.


Left from the Lehrter railway station. Swede in shirt sleeves. Strong-looking girl with all the silver bracelets. Changing trains in Buchen during the night. Lübeck. Hotel Schützenhaus dreadful. Cluttered walls, dirty clothes under the sheet, neglected building; a bus boy was the only servant. Afraid of the room, I went into the garden and sat down over a bottle of mineral water. Opposite me a hunchback drinking beer and a thin, anemic young man who was smoking. Slept nevertheless, but was awakened early in the morning by the sun shining through the large window straight into my face. The window looked out on the railway tracks; incessant noise of the trains. Relief and happiness after moving to the Hotel Kaiserhof on the Trave.


Trip to Travemünde. Mixed bathing. View of the beach. Afternoon on the sand. My bare feet struck people as indecent. Near me a man who was apparently an American. Instead of eating lunch walked past all the pensions and restaurants. Sat among the trees in front of the Kurhaus and listened to the dinner music.


In Lübeck a walk on the Wall. Sad, forlorn-looking man on a bench. Bustle on the Sportplatz. Quiet square, people on stairs and stones in front of every door. Morning from the window. Unloading timber from a sailing boat. Dr. Weiss at the railway station. Unfailing resemblance to Löwy. Unable to make up my mind on Gleschendorf. Meal in the Hansa dairy. “The Blushing Virgin.” Shopping for dinner. Telephone conversation with Gleschendorf. Trip to Marienlyst. Ferry. Mysterious disappearance of a young man wearing a raincoat and hat and his mysterious reappearance in the carriage on the trip from Vaggerloese to Marienlyst.



28 July. Despairing first impression of the barrenness, the miserable house, the bad food with neither fruit nor vegetables, the quarrels between W. and H. Decided to leave the next day. Gave notice. Stayed nevertheless. A reading from Überfall; I was unable to listen, to enjoy it with them, to judge. W.'s improvised speeches. Beyond me. The man writing in the middle of the garden; fat face, black eyes, pomaded long hair brushed straight back. Rigid stare, looked right and left out of the corners of his eyes. The children, uninterested, sat around has table like flies—I am more and more unable to think, to observe, to determine the truth of things, to remember, to speak, to share an experience; I am turning to stone, this is the truth. I am more and more unable even in the office. If I can't take refuge in some work, I am lost. Is my knowledge of this as clear as the thing itself? I shun people not because I want to live quietly, but rather because I want to die quietly. I think of the walk we, E. and I, took from the tram to the Lehrter railway station. Neither of us spoke, I thought nothing but that each step taken was that much of a gain for me. And E. is nice to me, believes in me for some incomprehensible reason, in spite of having seen me before the tribunal; now and then I even feel the effect of this faith in me, without, however, fully believing in the feeling.


The first time in many months that I felt any life stir in me in the presence of other people was in the compartment on the return trip from Berlin, opposite the Swiss woman. She reminded me of G.W. Once she even exclaimed: Children! She had headaches, her blood gave her so much trouble. Ugly, neglected little body; bad, cheap dress from a Paris department store. Freckles on her face. But small feet; a body completely under control because of its diminutive size, and despite its clumsiness, round, firm cheeks, sparkling, inextinguishable eyes.


The Jewish couple who lived next to me. Young people, shy and unassuming; her large hooked nose and slender body; he had a slight squint, was pale, short, and stout; at night he coughed a little. They often walked one behind the other. Sight of the tumbled bed in their room.


Danish couple. The man often very proper in a dinner jacket, the woman tanned, a weak yet coarse-featured face. Were silent a good deal; sometimes sat side by side, their heads inclined towards one another as on a cameo.


The impudent, good-looking youngster. Always smoking cigarettes. Looked at H. impudently, challengingly, admiringly, scornfully, and contemptuously, all in one glance. Sometimes he paid her no attention at all. Silently demanded a cigarette from her. Soon thereafter, from the distance, offered her one. Wore torn trousers. If anyone is going to spank him, it will have to be done this summer; by next summer he will be doing the spanking. Strokes the arms of almost all the chambermaids; not humbly, however, not with embarrassment but rather like some lieutenant whose still childish face permitted him liberties that would later be denied him. How he makes as if to chop off the head of a doll with his knife at the dinner table.


Lancers. Four couples. By lamplight and to gramophone music in the main hall. After each figure a dancer hurried to the gramophone and put on a new record. A decorous, graceful, and earnestly executed dance, especially on the part of the men. Cheerful, red-cheeked fellow, a man of the world, whose inflated stiff shirt made his broad, high chest seem even higher; the pale nonchalant fellow with a superior air, joking with everyone; beginning of a paunch; loud, ill-fitting clothes; many languages; read Die Zukunft; the gigantic father of the goitrous, wheezing family; you were able to recognize them by their labored breathing and infantile bellies; he and his wife (with whom he danced very gallantly) demonstratively sat at the children's table, where indeed his offspring were most heavily represented.


The proper, neat, trustworthy gentleman with a face looking almost sulky in its utter solemnity; modesty and manliness. Played the piano. The gigantic German with dueling scars on his square face whose puffed lips came together so placidly when he spoke. His wife, a hard and friendly Nordic face, accentuated, beautiful walk, accentuated freedom of her swaying hips. Woman from Lübeck with shining eyes. Three children, including Georg who, thoughtless as a butterfly, alighted beside complete strangers. Then in childish talkativeness asked some meaningless question. For example, we were sitting and correcting the “Kampf.” Suddenly he appeared and in a matter-of-fact, trustful, and loud voice asked where the other children had run off to.


The stiff old gentleman who was a demonstration of what the noble Nordic wise-heads look like in old age. Decayed and unrecognizable; yet beautiful young wise-heads were also running around there.



29 July. The two friends, one of them blond, resembling Richard Strauss, smiling, reserved, clever; the other dark, correctly dressed, mild-mannered yet firm, too dainty, lisped; both of them gourmets, kept drinking wine, coffee, beer, brandy, smoked incessantly, one poured for the other; their room across from mine full of French books; wrote a great deal in the stuffy writing room when the weather was mild.


Joseph K., the son of a rich merchant, one evening after a violent quarrel with his father—his father had reproached him for his dissipated life and demanded that he put an immediate stop to it—went, with no definite purpose but only because he was tired and completely at a loss, to the house of the corporation of merchants which stood all by itself near the harbor. The doorkeeper made a deep bow, Joseph looked casually at him without a word of greeting. “These silent underlings do everything one supposes them to be doing,” he thought. “If I imagine that he is looking at me insolently, then he really is.” And he once more turned to the doorkeeper, again without a word of greeting; the latter turned towards the street and looked up at the overcast sky.


I was in great perplexity. Only a moment ago I had known what to do. With his arm held out before him the boss had pushed me to the door of the store. Behind the two counters stood my fellow clerks, supposedly my friends, their gray faces lowered in the darkness to conceal their expressions.


“Get out!” the boss shouted. “Thief! Get out! Get out, I say!”


“It's not true,” I shouted for the hundredth time; “I didn't steal! It's a mistake or a slander! Don't you touch me! I'll sue you! There are still courts here! I won't go! For five years I slaved for you like a son and now you treat me like a thief. I didn't steal; for God's sake, listen to me, I didn't steal.”


“Not another word,” said the boss, “you're fired!”


We were already at the glass door, an apprentice darted out in front of us and quickly opened it; the din coming in from what was indeed an out-of-the-way street brought me back to reality; I halted in the doorway, arms akimbo, and, as calmly as I could despite my breathlessness, merely said, “I want my hat.”


“You'll get it,” the boss said, walked back a few steps, took the hat from Grassmann, one of the clerks, who had jumped over the counter, tried to throw it to me but missed his aim, and anyway threw it too hard, so that the hat flew past me into the street.


“You can keep the hat now,” I said, and went out into the street. And now I was in a quandary. I had stolen, had slipped a five-gulden bill out of the till to take Sophie to the theater that evening. But she didn't even want to go to the theater; payday was three days off, at that time I should have had my own money; besides, I had committed the theft stupidly, in broad daylight, near the glass window of the office in which the boss sat looking at me. “Thief!” he shouted, and sprang out of the office. “I didn't steal,” was the first thing I said, but the five-gulden bill was in my hand and the till open.


Made jottings on the trip in another notebook. Began things that went wrong. But I will not give up in spite of insomnia, headaches, a general incapacity. I've summoned up my last resources to this end. I made the remark that “I don't avoid people in order to live quietly, but rather in order to be able to die quietly.” But now I will defend myself. For a month, during the absence of my boss, I'll have the time.



30 July. Tired of working in other people's stores, I had opened up a little stationery store of my own. Since my means were limited and I had to pay cash for almost everything—


I sought advice, I wasn't stubborn. It was not stubbornness when I silently laughed with contorted face and feverishly shining cheeks at someone who had unwittingly proffered me advice. It was suspense, a readiness on my part to be instructed, an unhealthy lack of stubbornness.


The director of the Progress Insurance Company was always greatly dissatisfied with his employees. Now every director is dissatisfied with his employees; the difference between employees and directors is too vast to be bridged by means of mere commands on the part of the director and mere obedience on the part of the employees. Only mutual hatred can bridge the gap and give the whole enterprise its perfection.


Bauz, the director of the Progress Insurance Company, looked doubtfully at the man standing in front of his desk applying for a job as attendant with the company. Now and then he also glanced at the man's papers lying before him on the desk.


“You're tall enough,” he said, “I can see that; but what can you do? Our attendants must be able to do more than lick stamps; in fact, that's the one thing they don't have to be able to do, because we have machines to do that kind of thing. Our attendants are part officials, they have responsible work to do; do you feel you are qualified for that? Your head is shaped peculiarly. Your forehead recedes so. Remarkable. Now, what was your last position? What? You haven't worked for a year? Why was that? You had pneumonia? Really? Well, that isn't much of a recommendation, is it? Naturally, we can employ only people who are in good health. Before you are taken on you will have to be examined by the doctor. You are quite well now? Really? Of course, that could be. Speak up a little! Your whispering makes me nervous. I see here that you're also married, have four children. And you haven't worked for a year! Really, man! Your wife takes in washing? I see. Well, all right. As long as you're already here, get the doctor to examine you now; the attendant will show you the way. But that doesn't mean that you will be hired, even if the doctor's opinion is favorable. By no means. In any event, you'll receive our decision in writing. To be frank, I may as well tell you at once: I'm not at all impressed with you. We need an entirely different kind of attendant. But have yourself examined in any case. And now go, go. Trembling like that won't do you any good. I have no authority to hand out favors. You're willing to do any kind of work? Certainly. Everyone is. That's no special distinction. It merely indicates the low opinion you have of yourself. And now I'm telling you for the last time: Go along and don't take up any more of my time. This is really enough.”


Bauz had to strike the desk with his hand before the man let himself be led out of the director's office by the attendant.


I mounted my horse and settled myself firmly in the saddle. The maid came running to me from the gate and announced that my wife still wanted to speak to me on an urgent matter; would I wait just a moment, she hadn't quite finished dressing yet. I nodded and sat quietly on my horse, who now and then gently raised his forelegs and reared a little. We lived on the outskirts of the village; before me, in the sun, the highway mounted a slope whose opposite side a small wagon had just ascended, which now came driving down into the village at a rapid pace. The driver brandished his whip, a woman in a provincial yellow dress sat in the dark and dusty interior of the wagon.


I was not at all surprised that the wagon stopped in front of my house.



31 July. I have no time. General mobilization. K. and P. have been called up. Now I receive the reward for living alone. But it is hardly a reward; living alone ends only with punishment. Still, as a consequence, I am little affected by all the misery and am firmer in my resolve than ever. I shall have to spend my afternoons in the factory; I won't live at home, for Elli and the two children are moving in with us. But I will write in spite of everything, absolutely; it is my struggle for self-preservation.



1 August. Went to the train to see K. off. Relatives everywhere in the office. Would like to go to Valli's.



2 August. Germany has declared war on Russia—Swimming in the afternoon.



3 August. Alone in my sister's apartment. It is lower down than my room, it is also on a side street, hence the neighbors' loud talking below, in front of their doors. Whistling too. Otherwise complete solitude. No longed-for wife to open the door. In one month I was to have been married. The saying hurts: You've made your bed, now lie in it. You find yourself painfully pushed against the wall, apprehensively lower your eyes to see whose hand it is that pushes you, and, with a new pain in which the old is forgotten, recognize your own contorted hand holding you with a strength it never had for good work. You raise your head, again feel the first pain, again lower your gaze; this up-and-down motion of your head goes on without pause.



4 August. When I rented the place for myself I probably signed something for the landlord by which I bound myself to a two- or even six-year lease. Now he is basing his demand on this agreement. My stupidity, or rather, my general and utter helplessness. Drop quietly into the river. Dropping probably seems so desirable to me because it reminds me of “being pushed.”



5 August. The business almost settled, by the expenditure of the last of my strength. Was there twice with Malek as witness, at Felix's to draft the lease, at the lawyers' (6 kr), and all of it unnecessary; I could and should have done it all myself.



6 August. The artillery that marched across the Graben. Flowers, shouts of hurrah! and nazdar! The rigidly silent, astonished, attentive black face with black eyes.


I am more broken down than recovered. An empty vessel, still intact yet already in the dust among the broken fragments; or already in fragments yet still ranged among those that are intact. Full of lies, hate, and envy. Full of incompetence, stupidity, thickheadedness. Full of laziness, weakness, and helplessness. Thirty-one years old. I saw the two agriculturists in Ottla's picture. Young, fresh people possessed of some knowledge and strong enough to put it to use among people who in the nature of things resist their efforts somewhat. One of them leading beautiful horses; the other lies in the grass, the tip of his tongue playing between his lips in his otherwise unmoving and absolutely trustworthy face.


I discover in myself nothing but pettiness, indecision, envy, and hatred against those who are fighting and whom I passionately wish everything evil.


What will be my fate as a writer is very simple. My talent for portraying my dreamlike inner life has thrust all other matters into the background; my life has dwindled dreadfully, nor will it cease to dwindle. Nothing else will ever satisfy me. But the strength I can muster for that portrayal is not to be counted upon: perhaps it has already vanished forever, perhaps it will come back to me again, although the circumstances of my life don't favor its return. Thus I waver, continually fly to the summit of the mountain, but then fall back in a moment. Others waver too, but in lower regions, with greater strength; if they are in danger of falling, they are caught up by the kinsman who walks beside them for that very purpose. But I waver on the heights; it is not death, alas, but the eternal torments of dying.


Patriotic parade. Speech by the mayor. Disappears, then reappears, and a shout in German: “Long live our beloved monarch, hurrah!” I stand there with my malignant look. These parades are one of the most disgusting accompaniments of the war. Originated by Jewish businessmen who are German one day, Czech the next; admit this to themselves, it is true, but were never permitted to shout it out as loudly as they do now. Naturally they carry many others along with them. It was well organized. It is supposed to be repeated every evening, twice tomorrow and Sunday.



7 August. Even if you have not the slightest sensitivity to individual differences, you still treat everyone in his own way. L. of Binz, in order to attract attention, poked his stick at me and frightened me.


Yesterday and today wrote four pages, trivialities difficult to surpass.


Strindberg is tremendous. This rage, these pages won by fistfighting.


Chorus from the tavern across the way. I just went to the window. Sleep seems impossible. The song is coming through the open door of the tavern. A girl's voice is leading them. They are singing simple love songs. I hope a policeman comes along. There he comes. He stops in front of the door for a moment and listens. Then calls out: “Landlord!” The girl's voice: “Vojtíšku.” A man in trousers and shirt jumps forward out of a corner. “Close the door! You're making too much noise.” “Oh sorry, sorry,” says the landlord, and with delicate and obliging gestures, as if he were dealing with a lady, first closes the door behind him, then opens it to slip out, and closes it again. The policeman (whose behavior, especially his anger, is incomprehensible, for the singing can't disturb him but must rather sweeten his monotonous round) marches off; the singers have lost all desire to sing.



11 August. I imagine that I have remained in Paris, walk through it arm in arm with my uncle, pressed close to his side.



12 August. Didn't sleep at all. Lay three hours in the afternoon on the sofa, sleepless and apathetic; the same at night. But it mustn't thwart me.



15 August. I have been writing these past few days, may it continue. Today I am not so completely protected by and enclosed in my work as I was two years ago, nevertheless have the feeling that my monotonous, empty, mad bachelor's life has some justification. I can once more carry on a conversation with myself, and don't stare so into complete emptiness. Only in this way is there any possibility of improvement for me.



MEMOIRS OF THE KALDA RAILWAY

During one period of my life—it is many years ago now—I had a post with a small railway in the interior of Russia. I have never been so forsaken as I was there. For various reasons that do not matter now, I had been looking for just such a place at the time; the more solitude ringing in my ears the better I liked it, and I don't mean now to make any complaint. At first I had only missed a little activity. The little railway may originally have been built with some commercial purpose in view, but the capital had been insufficient, construction came to a halt, and instead of terminating at Kalda, the nearest village of any size, a five-day journey from us by wagon, the railway came to an end at a small settlement right in the wilderness, still a full day's journey from Kalda.


Now even if the railway had extended to Kalda it would perforce have remained an unprofitable venture for an indefinite period, for the whole notion of it was wrong; the country needed roads, not railways, nor could the railway manage at all in its present state; the two trains running daily carried freight a light wagon could have hauled, and its only passengers were a few farm hands during the summer. But still they did not want to shut down the railway altogether, for they went on hoping that if it were kept in operation they could attract the necessary capital for furthering the construction work. Even this hope was, in my opinion, not so much hope as despair and laziness. They kept the railway in operation so long as there were still supplies of coal available, the wages of their few workers they paid irregularly and not in full, as though they were gifts of charity; as for the rest, they waited for the whole thing to collapse.


It was by this railway, then, that I was employed, living in a wooden shed left standing from the time of the railway's construction, and now serving at the same time as a station. There was only one room, in which a bunk had been set up for me—and a desk for any writing I might have to do. Above it was installed the telegraphic apparatus. In the spring, when I arrived, one train would pass the station very early in the day—later this was changed—and it sometimes happened that a passenger would alight at the station while I was still asleep. In that case, of course—the nights there were very cool until midsummer—he did not remain outside in the open but knocked, I would unbolt the door, and then we would often pass hours in chatting. I lay on my bunk, my guest squatted on the floor or, following my instructions, brewed tea which we then drank together sociably. All these village people were distinguished by a great sociability. Moreover, I perceived that I was not particularly suited to stand a condition of utter solitude, admit as I had to that my self-imposed solitude had already, after a short time, begun to dissipate my past sorrows. I have in general found that it is extremely difficult for a misfortune to dominate a solitary person for any length of time. Solitude is powerful beyond everything else, and drives one back to people. Naturally, you then attempt to find new ways, ways seemingly less painful but in reality simply not yet known.


I became more attached to the people there than I should have thought possible. It was naturally not a regular contact with them that I had. All the five villages with which I had to do were several hours distant from the station as well as from each other. I dared not venture too far from the station, lest I lose my job. And under no circumstances did I want that, at least not in the beginning. For this reason I could not go to the villages themselves, and had to depend on the passengers or on people not deterred by the long journey that had to be made to visit me. During the very first month such people dropped in; but no matter how friendly they were, it was easy to see that they came only on the chance of transacting some business with me, nor did they make any attempt to conceal their purpose. They brought butter, meat, corn, all sorts of things; at first, so long as I had any money, I habitually bought everything almost sight unseen, so welcome were these people to me, some of them especially. Later, though, I limited my purchases, among other reasons because I thought I noticed a certain contempt on their part for the manner in which I bought things. Besides, the train also brought me food, food, however, that was very bad and even more expensive than that which the peasants brought.


Originally I had intended to plant a small vegetable garden, to buy a cow, and in this way make myself as self-sufficient as I could. I had even brought along gardening tools and seed; there was a great deal of uncultivated ground around my hut stretching away on one level without the slightest rise as far as the eye could see. But I was too weak to conquer the soil. A stubborn soil that was frozen solid until spring and that even resisted the sharp edge of my new pick. Whatever seed one sowed in it was lost. I had attacks of despair during this labor. I lay in my bunk for days, not coming out even when the trains arrived. I would simply put my head through the window, which was right above my bunk, and report that I was sick. Then the train crew, which consisted of three men, came in to get warm, though they found very little warmth—whenever possible I avoided using the old iron stove that so easily blew up. I preferred to lie there wrapped in an old warm coat and covered by the various skins I had bought from the peasants over a period of time. “You're often sick,” they said to me. “You're a sickly person. You won't leave this place alive.” They did not say this to depress me, but rather strove straightforwardly to speak the truth whenever possible. Their eyes usually goggled peculiarly at such times.


Once a month, but always on a different day of the month, an inspector came to examine my record book, to collect the money I had taken in and—but not always—to pay me my salary. I was always warned of his arrival a day in advance by the people who had dropped him at the last station. They considered this warning the greatest favor they could do me in spite of the fact that I naturally always had everything in good order. Nor was the slightest effort needed for this. And the inspector too always came into the station with an air as if to say, this time I shall unquestionably uncover the evidence of your mismanagement. He always opened the door of the hut with a push of his knee, giving me a look at the same time. Hardly had he opened my book when he found a mistake. It took me a long time to prove to him, by recomputing it before his eyes, that the mistake had been made not by me but by him. He was always dissatisfied with the amount I had taken in, then clapped his hand on the book and gave me a sharp look again. “We'll have to shut down the railway,” he would say each time. “It will come to that,” I usually replied.


After the inspection had been concluded, our relationship would change. I always had brandy ready and, whenever possible, some sort of delicacy. We drank to each other; he sang in a tolerable voice, but always the same two songs. One was sad and began: “Where are you going, O child in the forest?” The other was gay and began like this: “Merry comrades, I am yours!”—It depended on the mood I was able to put him in, how large an installment I got on my salary. But it was only at the beginning of these entertainments that I watched him with any purpose in mind; later we were quite at one, cursed the company shamelessly, he whispered secret promises into my ear about the career he would help me to achieve, and finally we fell together on the bunk in an embrace that often lasted ten hours unbroken. The next morning he went on his way, again my superior. I stood beside the train and saluted; often as not he turned to me while getting aboard and said, “Well, my little friend, we'll meet again in a month. You know what you have at stake.” I can still see the bloated face he turned to me with an effort, every feature in his face stood prominently forth, cheeks, nose, lips.


This was the one great diversion during the month when I let myself go; if inadvertently some brandy had been left over, I guzzled it down immediately after the inspector left. I could generally hear the parting whistle of the train while it gurgled into me. The thirst that followed a night of this sort was terrible; it was as if another person were within me, sticking his head and throat out of my mouth and screaming for something to drink. The inspector was provided for, he always carried a large supply of liquor on his train; but I had to depend on whatever was left over.


But then the whole month thereafter I did not drink, did not smoke either; I did my work and wanted nothing more. There was, as I have said, not very much to do, but what there was I did thoroughly. It was my duty every day, for instance, to clean and inspect the track a kilometer on either side of the station. But I did not limit myself to what was required and often went much farther, so far that I was barely able to make out the station. In clear weather the station could be seen at a distance of perhaps five kilometers, for the country was quite flat. And then, if I had gone so far off that the hut in the distance only glimmered before my eyes, I sometimes saw—it was an optical illusion—many black dots moving towards the hut. There were whole companies, whole troops. But sometimes someone really came; then, swinging my pick, I ran all the long way back.


I finished my work towards evening and finally could retreat into my hut. Generally no visitors came at this hour, for the journey back to the villages was not entirely safe at night. All sorts of shiftless fellows drifted about in the neighborhood; they were not natives, however, and others would take their place from time to time, but then the original ones would come back again. I got to see most of them, they were attracted by the lonely station; they were not really dangerous, but you had to deal firmly with them.


They were the only ones who disturbed me during the long twilight hours. Otherwise I lay on my bunk, gave no thought to the past, no thought to the railway, the next train did not come through till between ten and eleven at night; in short, I gave no thought to anything. Now and then I read an old newspaper thrown to me from the train; it contained the gossip of Kalda, which would have interested me but which I could not understand from disconnected issues. Moreover, in every issue there was an installment of a novel called The Commander’s Revenge. I once dreamed of this commander, who always wore a dagger at his side, on one particular occasion even held it between his teeth. Besides, I could not read much, for it got dark early and paraffin or a tallow candle was prohibitively expensive. Every month the railway gave me only half a liter of paraffin, which I used up long before the end of the month merely in keeping the signal light lit half an hour for the train every evening. But this light wasn't at all necessary, and later on, at least on moonlit nights, I would neglect to light it. I correctly foresaw that with the passing of summer I should stand in great need of paraffin. I therefore dug a hole in one corner of the hut, put an old tarred beer keg in it, and every month poured in the paraffin I had saved. It was covered with straw and could attract no attention. The more the hut stank of paraffin, the happier I was; the smell got so strong because the old and rotten staves of the keg had soaked up the paraffin. Later, as a precaution, I buried the keg outside the hut; for once the inspector had boasted to me of a box of wax matches, and when I had asked to see them, threw them one after the other blazing into the air. Both of us, and especially the paraffin, were in real danger; I saved everything by throttling him until he dropped all the matches.


In my leisure hours I often considered how I might prepare for winter. If I was freezing even now, during the warm part of the year—and they said it was warmer than it had been for many years—it would fare very badly with me during the winter. That I was hoarding paraffin was only a whim; if I had been acting sensibly, I should have had to lay up many things for the winter; there was little doubt that the company would not be especially solicitous of my welfare; but I was too heedless, or rather, I was not heedless but I cared too little about myself to want to make much of an effort. Now, during the warm season, things were going tolerably, I left it at that and did nothing further.


One of the attractions that had drawn me to this station had been the prospect of hunting. I had been told that the country was extraordinarily rich in game, and I had already put down a deposit on a gun I wanted sent to me when I had saved up a little money. Now it turned out that there was no trace of game animals here, only wolves and bears were reported, though during the first few months I had failed to see any; otherwise there were only unusually large rats which I had immediately caught sight of running in packs across the steppe as if driven by the wind. But the game I had been looking forward to was not to be found. The people hadn't misinformed me; a region rich in game did exist, but it was a three-day journey away—I had not considered that directions for reaching a place in this country, with its hundreds of kilometers of uninhabited areas, must necessarily be uncertain. In any event, for the time being I had no need of the gun and could use the money for other purposes; still, I had to provide myself with a gun for the winter and I regularly laid money aside for that purpose. As for the rats that sometimes attacked my provisions, my long knife sufficed to deal with them.


During the first days, when I was still eagerly taking in everything, I spitted one of these rats on the point of my knife and held it before me at eye level against the wall. You can see small animals clearly only if you hold them before you at eye level; if you stoop down to them on the ground and look at them there, you acquire a false, imperfect notion of them. The most striking feature of these rats was their claws—large, somewhat hollow, and yet pointed at the ends, they were well suited to dig with. Hanging against the wall in front of me in its final agony, it rigidly stretched out its claws in what seemed to be an unnatural way; they were like small hands reaching out to you.


In general these animals bothered me little, only sometimes woke me up at night when they hurried by the hut in a patter of running feet on the hard ground. If I then sat up and perhaps lit a small wax candle, I could see a rat's claws sticking in from the outside and working feverishly at some hole it was digging under the boards. This work was all in vain, for to dig a hole big enough for itself it would have had to work days on end, and yet it fled with the first brightening of the day; despite this it labored on like a workman who knew what he was doing. And it did good work; the particles it threw up as it dug were imperceptible indeed, on the other hand its claw was probably never used without result. At night I often watched this at length, until the calm and regularity of it put me to sleep. Then I would no longer have the energy to put out the little candle, and for a short while it would shine down for the rat at its work.


Once, on a warm night, when I had again heard these claws at work, I cautiously went outside without lighting a candle in order to see the animal itself. Its head, with its sharp snout, was bowed very low, pushed down almost between its forelegs in the effort to crowd as close as possible to the wood and dig in claws as deep as possible under it. You might have thought there was someone inside the hut holding it by the claws and trying bodily to pull the animal in, so taut was every muscle. And yet everything was ended with one kick, by which I killed the beast. Once fully awake, I could not tolerate any attack on my only possession, the hut.


To safeguard the hut against these rats I stopped all the holes with straw and tow and every morning examined the floor all around. I also intended to cover the hard-packed earthen floor of the hut with planks; such a flooring would also be useful for the winter. A peasant from the next village, Jekoz by name, long ago had promised to bring me some well-seasoned planks for this purpose, and I had often entertained him hospitably in return for this promise, nor did he stay very long away from me but came every fortnight, occasionally bringing shipments to send by the railway; but he never brought the planks. He had all sorts of excuses for this, usually that he himself was too old to carry such a load, and his son, who would be the one to bring the planks, was just then hard at work in the fields. Now according to his own account, which seemed correct enough, Jekoz was considerably more than seventy years old; but he was a tall man and still very strong. Besides, his excuses varied, and on another occasion he spoke of the difficulties of obtaining planks as long as those I needed. I did not press him, had no urgent need for the planks, it was Jekoz himself who had given me the idea of a plank flooring in the first place; perhaps a flooring would do no good at all; in short, I was able to listen calmly to the old man's lies. My customary greeting was: “The planks, Jekoz!” At once the apologies began in a half-stammer, I was called inspector or captain or even just telegrapher, which had a particular meaning for him; he promised me not only to bring the planks very shortly, but also, with the help of his son and several neighbors, to tear down my whole hut and build me a solid house in its stead. I listened until I grew tired, then pushed him out. While yet in the doorway, in apology he raised his supposedly feeble arms, with which he could in reality have throttled a grown man to death. I knew why he did not bring the planks; he supposed that when the winter was closer at hand I should have a more pressing need for them—and would pay a better price; besides, as long as the boards were not delivered he himself would be more important to me. Now he was of course not stupid and knew that I was aware of what was in the back of his mind, but in the fact that I did not exploit this knowledge he saw his advantage, and this he preserved.


But all the preparations I had been making to secure the hut against the animals and protect myself against the winter had to be interrupted when (the first three months of my service were coming to an end) I became seriously ill. For years I had been spared any illness, even the slightest indisposition, but now I became indisputably sick. It began with a heavy cough. About two hours up-country from the station there was a little brook, where I used to go to fetch my supply of water in a barrel on a wheelbarrow. I often bathed there too, and this cough was the result. The fits of coughing were so severe that I had to double up when I coughed, I imagined I should not be able to survive the coughing unless I doubled up and so gathered together all my strength. I thought my coughing would terrify the train crew, but they knew all about it, called it the wolf's cough. After that I began to hear the howl in the cough. I sat on the little bench in front of the hut and greeted the train with a howl, with a howl I accompanied it on its way when it departed. At night, instead of lying down, I knelt on the bunk and pressed my face into the skins at least to spare myself hearing my howls. I waited tensely until the bursting of some vital blood vessel should put an end to everything. But nothing of the kind happened and the coughing even abated after a few days. There is a tea that cures it, and one of the locomotive engineers promised to bring me some, but explained that it must be drunk only on the eighth day after the coughing began, otherwise it was of no use. On the eighth day he did in fact bring it, and I remember how not only the train crew but the passengers as well, two young peasants, came into my hut, for it was accounted lucky to hear the first cough after the drinking of the tea. I drank, coughed the first mouthful into the faces of my guests, but then immediately felt a real relief, though indeed the coughing had already been easier during the last two days. But a fever remained and did not go down.


This fever tired me a great deal, I lost all my resistance; sometimes, quite unexpectedly, sweat would break out on my forehead, my whole body would tremble, and regardless of where I was I had to lie down and wait until I came to my senses again. I clearly perceived that I was not getting better, but worse, and that it was essential that I go to Kalda and stay there a few days until my condition improved.



21 August. Began with such hope and was then repulsed by all three stories; today more so than ever. It may be true that the Russian story ought to be worked on only after The Trial. In this ridiculous hope, which apparently has only some mechanical notion behind it of how things work, I start The Trial again—The effort wasn't entirely without result.



29 August. The end of one chapter a failure; another chapter, which began beautifully, I shall hardly—or rather certainly not—be able to continue as beautifully, while at the time, during the night, I should certainly have succeeded with it. But I must not forsake myself, I am entirely alone.



30 August. Cold and empty. I feel only too strongly the limits of my abilities, narrow limits, doubtless, unless I am completely inspired. And I believe that even in the grip of inspiration I am swept along only within these narrow limits, which, however, I then no longer feel because I am being swept along. Nevertheless, within these limits there is room to live, and for this reason I shall probably exploit them to a despicable degree.


A quarter to two at night. Across the street a child is crying. Suddenly a man in the same room, as near to me as if he were just outside the window, speaks. “I'd rather jump out of the window than listen to any more of that.” He nervously growls something else, his wife, silent except for her shushing, tries to put the child to sleep again.



1 September. In complete helplessness barely wrote two pages. I fell back a great deal today, though I slept well. Yet if I wish to transcend the initial pangs of writing (as well as the inhibiting effect of my way of life) and rise up into the freedom that perhaps awaits me, I know that I must not yield. My old apathy hasn't completely deserted me yet, as I can see, and my coldness of heart perhaps never. That I recoil from no ignominy can as well indicate hopelessness as give hope.



13 September. Again barely two pages. At first I thought my sorrow over the Austrian defeats and my anxiety for the future (anxiety that appears ridiculous to me at bottom, and base too) would prevent me from doing any writing. But that wasn't it, it was only an apathy that forever comes back and forever has to be put down again. There is time enough for sorrow when I am not writing. The thoughts provoked in me by the war resemble my old worries over F. in the tormenting way in which they devour me from every direction. I can't endure worry, and perhaps have been created expressly in order to die of it. When I shall have grown weak enough—it won't take very long—the most trifling worry will perhaps suffice to rout me. In this prospect I can also see a possibility of postponing the disaster as long as possible. It is true that, with the greatest effort on the part of a nature then comparatively unweakened, there was little I was able to do against my worries over F.; but I had had the great support of my writing in the first days of that period; henceforth I will never allow it to be taken from me.



7 October. I have taken a week's vacation to push the novel on. Until today—it is Wednesday night, my vacation ends Monday—it has been a failure. I have written little and feebly. Even last week I was on the decline, but could not foresee that it would prove so bad. Are these three days enough to warrant the conclusion that I am unworthy of living without the office?



15 October. Two weeks of good work; full insight into my situation occasionally. Today, Thursday (Monday my holiday is over, I have taken an additional week), a letter from Miss Bl. I don't know what to do about it, I know it is certain that I shall live on alone (if I live at all—which is not certain), I also don't know whether I love F. (I remember the aversion I felt at the sight of her dancing with her severe eyes lowered, or when she ran her hand over her nose and hair in the Askanischer Hof shortly before she left, and the numberless moments of complete estrangement); but in spite of everything the enormous temptation returns again. I played with the letter all through the evening; I don't work though I could (even if I've had excruciating headaches this whole past week). I'm noting down from memory the letter I wrote to Miss Bl.:



What a strange coincidence, Grete, that it was just today I received your letter. I will not say with what it coincided, that concerns only me and the things that were troubling me tonight as I went to bed, about three. (Suicide; letter full of instructions to Max.)


Your letter was a great surprise to me. Not because you wrote to me. Why shouldn't you write to me? Though you do say that I hate you; but it isn't true. Were the whole world to hate you, I still shouldn't, and not only because I have no right to do so. You sat as a judge over me in the Askanischer Hof—it was awful for you, for me, for everyone—but it only seemed so; in reality all the time I was sitting in your place and sit there to this day.


You are completely mistaken about F. I don't say this to worm details from you. I can think of no detail—and my imagination has so often gone back and forth across this ground that I can trust it—I say I can think of no detail that could persuade me you are not mistaken. What you suggest is completely impossible; it makes me unhappy to think that F. should perhaps be deceiving herself for some undiscoverable reason. But that is also impossible.


I have always believed your interest to be honest and free from any personal consideration. Nor was your last letter an easy one to write. I warmly thank you for it.



What did this accomplish? The letter sounds unyielding, but only because I was ashamed, because I considered it irresponsible, because I was afraid to be yielding; by no means because I did not want to yield. That was the only thing I did want. It would be best for all of us if she would not answer, but she will answer and I shall wait for her answer.


. . . I have now lived calmly for two months without any real contact with F. (except through the correspondence with E.), have dreamed of F. as though of someone who was dead and could never live again, and now, when I am offered a chance to come near her, she is at once the center of everything again. She is probably also interfering with my work. How very much a stranger she has sometimes seemed to me these latter days when I would think of her, of all the people I had ever met the most remote; though at the same time I told myself that this was simply because F. had been closer to me than any other person, or at least had been thrust so close to me by other people.


Leafed through the diary a little. Got a kind of inkling of the way a life like this is constituted.



21 October. For four days almost no work at all, only an hour or so all the time and only a few lines, but slept better; as a result almost got rid of my headaches. No reply from Bl.; tomorrow is the last possible day.



25 October. My work almost completely at a standstill. What I write seems to lack independence, seems only the pale reflection of earlier work. Reply from Bl. arrived; I am completely undecided as to how to answer it. Thoughts so base that I cannot even write them down. Yesterday's sadness . . .



1 November. Yesterday, after a long time, made a great deal of progress; today again virtually nothing; the two weeks since my holiday have been almost a complete loss—Part of the day—it's Sunday—has been beautiful. In Chotek Park read Dostoyevsky's pamphlet in his own defense. The guard at the castle and the corps headquarters. The fountain in the Thun palace—Much self-satisfaction all day. And now I completely balk at any work. Yet it isn't balking; I see the task and the way to it, I simply have to push past small obstacles but cannot do it—Toying with thoughts of F.



3 November. In the afternoon a letter to E., looked through a story by Pick, “Der blinde Gast,” (The Blind Guest) and made some corrections, read a little Strindberg, then didn't sleep, home at half past eight, back at ten in fear of headaches which had already begun; and because I had slept very little during the night, did not work any more, partly too because I was afraid to spoil a fair passage I had written yesterday. Since August, the fourth day on which I have written nothing. The letters are the cause of it; I'll try to write none at all or only very short ones. How embarrassed I now am, and how it agitates me. Yesterday evening my excessive happiness after having read several lines by Jammes, whom otherwise I don't care for, but whose French (it is a description of a visit to a poet who was a friend of his) had so strong an effect on me.



4 November. P. back. Shouting excited past all bounds. Story about the mole burrowing under him in the trenches which he looked upon as a warning from heaven to leave that spot. He had just got away when a bullet struck a soldier crawling after him at the moment he was over the mole—His captain. They distinctly saw him taken prisoner. But the next day found him naked in the woods, pierced through by bayonets. He probably had had money on him, they wanted to search him and rob him of it, but he—“the way officers are”—wouldn't voluntarily submit to being touched—P. almost wept with rage and excitement when he met his boss (whom in the past he had admired ridiculously, out of all measure) on the train, elegantly dressed, perfumed, his opera glass dangling from his neck, on his way to the theater. (A month later he himself did the same with a ticket given him by this boss. He went to see Der ungetreue Eckehart, a comedy.) Slept one night in the castle of Princess Sapieha; one night, while his unit was in reserve, right in front of the Austrian batteries; one night in a peasant cottage, where two women were sleeping in each of the two beds standing right and left against each wall, a girl behind the stove, and eight soldiers on the floor—Punishment given soldiers. Stand bound to a tree until they turn blue.



12 November. Parents who expect gratitude from their children (there are even some who insist on it) are like usurers who gladly risk their capital if only they receive interest.



24 November. Yesterday on Tuchmachergasse, where they distribute old clothing to the refugees from Galicia. Max, his mother, Mr. Chaim Nagel. The intelligence, the patience, the friendliness, the industry, the affability, the wit, the dependability of Mr. Nagel. People who, within their sphere, do their work so thoroughly that you believe they could succeed in anything on earth—yet it is part of their perfection too that they don't reach out for anything beyond their sphere.


The clever, lively, proud, and unassuming Mrs. Kannegiesser from Tarnow, who wanted only two blankets, but nice ones, and who nevertheless, in spite of Max's influence, got only old, dirty ones, while the new blankets were put aside for the better people in another room, together with all the best things. Then, they didn't want to give her good ones because she needed them for only two days until her linen arrived from Vienna; they aren't permitted to take back used articles because of the danger of cholera.


Mrs. Lustig, with a lot of children of every size and her fresh, self-assured, sprightly little sister. She spent so much time looking for a dress for a little girl that Mrs. Brod shouted at her: “Now you take this or you won't get anything.” But then Mrs. Lustig answered in an even louder shout, ending with a wide, violent sweep of her arm: “The mitzveh [good deed] is worth more than all these shmattes [rags].”



25 November. Utter despair, impossible to pull myself together; only when I have become satisfied with my sufferings can I stop.



30 November. I can't write any more. I've come up against the last boundary, before which I shall in all likelihood again sit down for years, and then in all likelihood begin another story all over again that will again remain unfinished. This fate pursues me. And I have become cold again, and insensible; nothing is left but a senile love for unbroken calm. And like some kind of beast at the farthest pole from man, I shift my neck from side to side again and for the time being should like to try again to have F. back. I'll really try it, if the nausea I feel for myself doesn't prevent me.



2 December. Afternoon at Werfel's with Max and Pick. Read “In the Penal Colony” aloud; am not entirely dissatisfied, except for its glaring and ineradicable faults. Werfel read some poems and two acts of Esther, Kaiserin von Persien (Esther, Empress of Persia). The acts carry one away. But I am easily carried away. The criticisms and comparisons put forward by Max, who was not entirely satisfied with the piece, disturb me, and I am no longer so sure of my impression of the play as a whole as I was while listening to it, when it overwhelmed me. I remember the Yiddish actors. W.'s handsome sisters. The elder one leaned against the chair, often looked at the mirror out of the corner of her eye, and then—as if she were not already devoured by my eyes—gently pointed a finger to a brooch pinned to her blouse. It was a low-cut dark blue blouse, her throat was covered with a tulle scarf. Repeated account of something that happened at the theater: some officers kept saying to each other in a loud voice during Kabale und Liebe: “Speckbacher is cutting a figure,” by which they meant an officer leaning against the side of a box.


The day's conclusion, even before meeting Werfel: Go on working regardless of everything; a pity I can't work today, for I am tired and have a headache, already had preliminary twinges in the office this morning. I'll go on working regardless of everything, it must be possible in spite of the office or the lack of sleep.


Dreamed tonight. With Kaiser Wilhelm. In the castle. The beautiful view. A room similar to that in the Tabakskollegium. Meeting with Matilde Serav. Unfortunately forgot everything.


From Esther: God's masterpieces fart at one another in the bath.



5 December. A letter from E. on the situation in her family. My relation to her family has a consistent meaning only if I conceive of myself as its ruin. This is the only natural explanation there is to make plausible everything that is astonishing in the relation. It is also the only connection I have at the moment with her family; otherwise I am completely divorced from it emotionally, although not more effectually, perhaps, than I am from the whole world. (A picture of my existence apropos of this would portray a useless stake covered with snow and frost, fixed loosely and slantwise into the ground in a deeply ploughed field on the edge of a great plain on a dark winter's night.) Only ruin has effect. I have made F. unhappy, weakened the resistance of all those who need her so much now, contributed to the death of her father, come between F. and E., and in the end made E. unhappy too, an unhappiness that gives every indication of growing worse. I am in the harness and it is my fate to pull the load. The last letter to her that I tortured out of myself she considers calm; it “breathes so much calmness,” as she puts it. It is of course not impossible that she puts it this way out of delicacy, out of forbearance, out of concern for me. I am indeed sufficiently punished in general, even my position in my own family is punishment enough; I have also suffered so much that I shall never recover from it (my sleep, my memory, my ability to think, my resistance to the tiniest worries have been weakened past all cure—strangely enough, the consequences of a long period of imprisonment are about the same); for the moment, however, my relationship to them causes me little suffering, at least less than F. or E. There is of course something tormenting in the fact that I am now supposed to take a Christmas trip with E., while F. will remain in Berlin.



8 December. Yesterday for the first time in ever so long an indisputable ability to do good work. And yet wrote only the first page of the “mother” chapter, for I had barely slept at all two nights, in the morning already had had indications of a headache, and had been too anxious about the next day. Again I realized that everything written down bit by bit rather than all at once in the course of the larger part (or even the whole) of one night is inferior, and that the circumstances of my life condemn me to this inferiority.



9 December. Together with E. K. of Chicago. He is almost touching. Description of his placid life. From eight to half past five in the mail-order house. Checking the shipments in the textile department. Fifteen dollars a week. Two weeks' holiday, one week with pay; after five years both weeks with pay. For a while, when there wasn't much to do in the textile department, he helped out in the bicycle department. Three hundred bicycles are sold a day. A wholesale business with ten thousand employees. They get all their customers by sending out catalogues. The Americans like to change their jobs, they don't particularly like to work in summer; but he doesn't like to change, doesn't see the point of it, you lose time and money by it. So far he has had two jobs, each for five years, and when he returns—he has an indefinite leave—he will go back to the same job, they can always use him, but can always do without him too. Evenings he generally stays at home, plays cards with friends; sometimes, for diversion, an hour at the cinema, in summer a walk, Sunday a boat ride on the lake. He is wary of marriage, even though he is already thirty-four years old, since American women often marry only in order to get divorced, a simple matter for them, but very expensive for the man.



13 December. Instead of working—I have written only one page (exegesis of the “Legend”)—looked through the finished chapters and found parts of them good. Always conscious that every feeling of satisfaction and happiness that I have, such, for example, as the “Legend” in particular inspires in me, must be paid for, and must be paid for moreover at some future time, in order to deny me all possibility of recovery in the present.


Recently at Felix's. On the way home told Max that I shall lie very contentedly on my deathbed, provided the pain isn't too great. I forgot—and later purposely omitted—to add that the best things I have written have their basis in this capacity of mine to meet death with contentment. All these fine and very convincing passages always deal with the fact that someone is dying, that it is hard for him to do, that it seems unjust to him, or at least harsh, and the reader is moved by this, or at least he should be. But for me, who believe that I shall be able to lie contentedly on my deathbed, such scenes are secretly a game; indeed, in the death enacted I rejoice in my own death, hence calculatingly exploit the attention that the reader concentrates on death, have a much clearer understanding of it than he, of whom I suppose that he will loudly lament on his deathbed, and for these reasons my lament is as perfect as can be, nor does it suddenly break off, as is likely to be the case with a real lament, but dies beautifully and purely away. It is the same thing as my perpetual lamenting to my mother over pains that were not nearly so great as my laments would lead one to believe. With my mother, of course, I did not need to make so great a display of art as with the reader.



14 December. My work goes forward at a miserable crawl, in what is perhaps its most important part, where a good night would stand me in such stead.


At Baum's in the afternoon. He was giving a pale little girl with glasses a piano lesson. The boy sat quietly in the gloom of the kitchen, carelessly playing with some unrecognizable object. Impression of great ease. Especially in contrast to the bustling about of the tall housemaid, who was washing dishes in a tub.



15 December. Didn't work at all. For two hours now have been looking through new company applications for the office. The afternoon at B.'s. He was somewhat offensive and rude. Empty talk in consequence of my debility, blankness, and stupidity almost; was inferior to him in every respect; it is a long time now since I have had a purely private conversation with him, was happy to be alone again. The joy of lying on the sofa in the silent room without a headache, calmly breathing in a manner befitting a human being.


The defeats in Serbia, the stupid leadership.



19 December. Yesterday wrote “The Village Schoolmaster” almost without knowing it, but was afraid to go on writing later than a quarter to two; the fear was well founded, I slept hardly at all, merely suffered through perhaps three short dreams and was then in the office in the condition one would expect. Yesterday Father's reproaches on account of the factory: “You talked me into it.” Then went home and calmly wrote for three hours in the consciousness that my guilt is beyond question, though not so great as Father pictures it. Today, Saturday, did not come to dinner, partly in fear of Father, partly in order to use the whole night for working; yet I wrote only one page that wasn't very good.


The beginning of every story is ridiculous at first. There seems no hope that this newborn thing, still incomplete and tender in every joint, will be able to keep alive in the completed organization of the world, which, like every completed organization, strives to close itself off. However, one should not forget that the story, if it has any justification to exist, bears its complete organization within itself even before it has been fully formed; for this reason despair over the beginning of a story is unwarranted; in a like case parents should have to despair of their suckling infant, for they had no intention of bringing this pathetic and ridiculous being into the world. Of course, one never knows whether the despair one feels is warranted or unwarranted. But reflecting on it can give one a certain support; in the past I have suffered from the lack of this knowledge.



20 December. Max's objection to Dostoyevsky, that he allows too many mentally ill persons to enter. Completely wrong. They aren't ill. Their illness is merely a way to characterize them, and moreover a very delicate and fruitful one. One need only stubbornly keep repeating of a person that he is simple-minded and idiotic, and he will, if he has the Dostoyevskian core inside him, be spurred on, as it were, to do his very best. His characterizations have in this respect about the same significance as insults among friends. If they say to one another, “You are a blockhead,” they don't mean that the other is really a blockhead who has disgraced them by his friendship; rather there is generally mixed in it an infinite number of intentions, if the insult isn't merely a joke, or even if it is. Thus, the father of the Karamazovs, though a wicked creature, is by no means a fool but rather a very clever man, almost the equal of Ivan, and in any case much cleverer than his cousin, for example, whom the novelist doesn't attack, or his nephew, the landowner, who feels so superior compared to him.



23 December. Read a few pages of Herzen's “Fogs of London.” Had no idea what it was all about, and yet the whole of the unconscious man emerged, purposeful, self-tormenting, having himself firmly in hand and then going to pieces again.



26 December. In Kuttenberg with Max and his wife. How I counted on the four free days, how many hours I pondered how best to spend them, and now perhaps disappointed after all. Tonight wrote almost nothing and am in all likelihood no longer capable of going on with “The Village Schoolmaster,” which I have been working at for a week now, and which I should certainly have completed in three free nights, perfect and with no external defect; but now, in spite of the fact that I am still virtually at the beginning, it already has two irremediable defects and in addition is stunted—New schedule from now on! Use the time even better! Do I make my laments here only to find salvation here? It won't come out of this notebook, it will come when I'm in bed and it will put me on my back so that I lie there beautiful and light and bluish-white; no other salvation will come.


Hotel in Kuttenberg Moravetz, drunken porter, tiny, roofed court with a skylight. The darkly outlined soldier leaning against the railing on the second floor of the building across the court. The room they offered me; its window opened upon a dark, windowless corridor. Red sofa, candle light. Jacobskirche, the devout soldiers, the girls' voices in the choir.



27 December. A merchant was greatly dogged by misfortune. He bore it for a long time, but finally was convinced that he could not bear it any longer, and went to one learned in the law. He intended to ask his advice and learn what he might do to ward off misfortune or to acquire the strength to bear it. Now the scripture always lay open before this sage, that he might study it. It was his custom to receive everyone who sought advice from him with these words: “I am just now reading of your case,” at the same time pointing with his finger to a passage of the page in front of him. The merchant, who had heard of this custom, did not like it; it is true that in this way the sage both asserted the possibility of his helping the supplicant, and relieved him of the fear that he had been visited with a calamity which worked in darkness, which he could share with no one and with which no one else could sympathize; but the incredibility of such a statement was after all too great and had in fact deterred the merchant from calling sooner on the man learned in the law. Even now he entered his house with hesitation, halting in the open doorway.



31 December. Have been working since August, in general not little and not badly, yet neither in the first nor in the second respect to the limit of my ability, as I should have done, especially as there is every indication (insomnia, headaches, weak heart) that my ability won't last much longer. Worked on, but did not finish: The Trial, “Memoirs of the Kalda Railway,” “The Village Schoolmaster,” “The Assistant Attorney,” and the beginnings of various little things. Finished only: “In the Penal Colony” and a chapter of Der Verschollene, both during the two-week holiday. I don't know why I am drawing up this summary, it's not at all like me!



Copyright Schocken Books, Inc.
Translated by Martin Greenberg, with the cooperation of Hannah Arendt




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