Your interest in my least worries warmed me very heartily. For the weather remains bad, inside and out. Ever since I have been gone, the day after tomorrow makes four weeks, no good day.
Did you really believe it interested me, with whom Miss K . . . plays tennis with this year? Am I so much a woman? I wanted only to bring you to speak because I honour the lines in your letters.
Question: Did Napoleon know his own self and to what extent?
Here in Sassnitz is the case of which you speak. But it isn’t tourists which inspire loathing here; the usual tourist with the important manner and thick book of tickets is at least laughable; here it’s the bathers. Do you know them? I believed today, as I heard the dreadful resort band playing on the beach of the lake, which did not immediately swallow them, that I had been transported onto the Ischl esplanade. Only a few Jews, but for them Berliners, Frankfurters and Saxons. The men – skat players, the women either motherly hyenas or daughterly soi-disant kittens; the one half ugly, the other with their skirts pulled tightly backwards crosswise. . . . Are you yourself not
also ashamed when you are drawn to that part of woman? Nature wanted to embody shamelessness in her.
I live, God be thanked, not in the middle of the elegant quarter, but rather in the Crampas area, in the house of a “copying-clerk”. Please write, but as before.
My father has sent 100 marks to me in Bayreuth, which I have returned to him. It is unpleasant enough for me to have to require his support from time to time after my return. By God’s will send me but nothing.
Have you been able to read my shorthand? And how have you met with it? Indeed, I myself can not suffer it. It is an invention which is undignifying to the word, its entire nature after commerciality, “modern” to excess. “No time. ”
My journey seems so absurd to me. Only geographically is it right. But as in Parsifal one should go on a pilgrimage, a long one, to the end of the earth, and then somehow vanish.
From where have you once got it, that also my future is dismal? Incidentally, I believe it will be so.
J . . . I will admonish no more. Moreover, one can destroy a man when one recommends him as suitable, and I am too good for some corner publisher. In any case, I will tell him that openly.
This journey has made me realize that I am also no philosopher. Truly not! But am I anything else? I very much doubt it –
May it continue to go well for you!
Yours
Otto W.
Picture postcard from Sassnitz. (Postmark: 18th August, 1902)
I am just back after a ride alone in a boat. I have rowed out in the moonlight.
The sky is a clear eye.
To turn the necks of all the waiters of the world in one night: that’s what I would like.
Going to Copenhagen Monday afternoon(poste restante).
Picture postcard of the Baltic Sea. 18th August, 1902
Half past midnight, between Sunday and Monday. I sit in a hotel by the beach, and see before me that part of the sea which glimmers beneath the full moon.
Copenhagen, 19th August 1902 ¼ to 12 at night.
Hello!
My father has now returned that hundred marks to me again. I thus go yet to Christiania. Please poste restante there.
Otto W.
Now it will be finally tested on a two-day sea voyage, whether I am seaworthy or not.
Frederikshavn (Northern tip of Jutland), 21st August, Thursday 10 o’clock in the morning.
Dear friend!
Excuse the card, that is, for the time being I am saving in order to gain as much as possible in Norway, and from here even the postage is expensive. So I now have 14 hours of sea travel behind me, and under that I spent almost the whole night on deck during considerable storms and up to 4m high waves; and I am seaworthy! as I had not expected otherwise of me. I believe that from nothing can the dignity of man so suffer than through seasickness. It’s characteristic enough, that the women all became seasick.
Of your letters, there is much I have not yet answered. Not because you do likewise with mine, but because that is perfectly natural. We both seem to want to put off discussions till my return (first week of September, around the middle). One fashions a message on things of little importance, to help the other to fix a picture of the moment.
Christiania, Friday, 22nd August, 1902.
Arrived here early today 5:48. I am very pleased: Here on Monday I will see “Peer Gynt” in the National Theater. Today I was listening to “Don Juan” here for the second time on my journey. The first time was in Munich.
O. W.
Christiania, 23rd August, 1902.
Best thanks for your letter.
If your excessive need to rejoice, which you project onto my arrival, would only not then bring a disappointment upon us both! I will fulfull your wish: you will be, as the last, so the first. I will advise you precisely of everything.
Under these circumstances I am received more cheerfully even at home, as I know from long experience, and the food is then paradoxically even better.
I should like to go from Bergen (on the West coast of Norway, where the fjords and glaciers are) by sea to Hamburg, and then via Magdeburg and Prague to Vienna. But please write, in any case, to Christiania . . .
Tuesday, Midday, 26th August, 1902
In a fir forest north of Christiania.
Eight days from tomorrow I should be in Hamburg and on the following Sunday in P. (probably at half past one in the afternoon coming from St. Pöltern. If you want, accompany me then from P. to W. ) – Yesterday I saw “Peer Gynt” and heard the song of Solveig. If the Viennese performance was very poor and the audience repugnant, so was this local performance oafish, the spectators idiotic. Ibsen must have suffered terribly in his surroundings. – I have now read a great amount of Norwegian and am astonished how accurately you guessed the text of the song. – All seven days of the week I have written you no letter. As soon as I would want to, the desire is lost. Do you understand me?
Otto W.
Hamburg, Thursday morning. (Postmark: 4, September 1902)
Dear friend!
I am now earnestly upon the journey home, which such men as you or I certainly never embark upon with that satisfied, enveloped contentment like the Philistines who indeed are really at home in house number X.
Yours Otto W.
Leipzig, 5th September 1902 6 pm.
Dear friend!
You see – already near the Bohemian forests.
I have just come out of the institute for “experimental” psychology, the higher school of the modern psychologist.
In all probability I will be in P. on Wednesday.
O. W.
(Postmark: 13th September, 1902. )
Dear friend!
I would have had to deal Dr. S. a lie or an insult yesterday, if I had remained with you.
I kiss you.
Otto W.
23rd September, 1902.
Dear friend!
Read “Peer Gynt” on a train, at least for the first time: on account of its effect, which I believe you will think back on for a long time.
Here will you also find pain and despair. And practically all forces in and outside of Man united upon one stage.
And once you have read it, then you should take the state examination.
My warmest regards.
Otto W.
(Postmark 27th September 1902. )
Dear friend!
R. informed me yesterday of everything.
I don’t believe it will go as far as that, but will remain as a threat. 54
54 At that time my family wanted me, as a 20 year old, to forgo either the association with O. W. or with the house. [Arthur Gerber]
But if it does, I expect of you that you, to begin with at least, will come to live with me and also share whatever else with me. I tell you, I regard this as a matter of course.
Please, write to me at once! Do you need money?
O.
4th October, 1902.
Thank you for your letter. You would also surely have wanted a Bayreuth for the two operas. 55 It is nevertheless a scandal. Even Mignon and Carmen become so laboured.
I find the thought of an essay “On the gait of man” very pleasing, but you should write it as soon as there is time and inclination. My feeling for what the gait of a man says is comparatively weak, much less expressed than with you, or than with my, for example, physiognomic impressions. It will also be useful to you with the Philistines if you handle such a serious subject, “although . . . ”.
In the end I would have had enough to do with the minutes of “Propria”.
11th October, 1902
. . . . I have by no means rejected the “gait”, I approve of it very much, that you lay such great worth on it, and I am myself very interested for your results. I can only infer, from the movements of the shoulders and hands, perhaps something of the attitude; the legs themselves hardly anything, rather more the acoustic image of the gait . . .
55 Mascagni’s “Cavalleria rusticana” and Leoncavallos “Bajazzo”. [Arthur Gerber]
Vienna, 18th October, 1902
Best thanks for your card,
