We got to talking together, of course through letters. We could not get to the end of all that we had to say to each other. In this exchange of ideas we discovered that we had in common so many opinions about art and life that it would have been sheer nonsense to keep bothering with society flourishes, and we began to use the “thou” like two good comrades. It was brother heart on this side, brother heart on that; but on one occasion I must have expressed myself so vigorously and so unequivocally—between comrades one is not so particular about little things—regarding some question which would have come within the purview of the as yet unpromulgated Lex Heinze, that a protest might seem proper. It followed in a very delicate, perfectly unobtrusive manner. The next letter ended with Deine ergebene—the feminine form.
I was dumfounded. So B. Oulot is a woman—who would have thought that of the man! I demanded an explanation and received one. B. Oulot was—Baroness Bertha von Suttner, born Countess Kinsky.—Well, all right then. I did not feel offended at it after that, and anyhow there was no changing it now.
This was just at the time of “the revolution in literature,” and we followed with the liveliest sympathy the phases of that revolution. Conrad, Bleibtreu, Alberti—we read all that they wrote and were amazed at their audacities. A Moderne was beginning to show its head—which, to be sure, has since been thrown on the rubbish heap by the very most modern Modernen. And in the plastic arts too the first symptoms of the Secession began to be distinguishable. Everywhere there was fermentation.—After all, there is at every period a newest thing which surprises and puzzles, is antagonized, wins, and soon becomes vieux jeu. That the present phase seems to one to be so unprecedentedly subversive of all that has been supreme, is mere illusion.
In October of this year, the first year of our return, the Congress of the Authors’ Union held its session in Berlin. In our capacity as members of the Union we were invited to be present, and we needed no second invitation.
I preserved in my diary a few pictures of this congress—the first which I had ever attended in my life—and later turned them to account in my Schriftstellerroman.
On the evening before the first business meeting, a “gathering and informal greeting of the members of the Union” took place in the Kaiserhalle.
At the entrance of the assembly hall, from which comes the loud buzz of hundreds of voices speaking at once, stands the host, that is to say, the President of the Congress, to receive the guests. That is Hermann Heiberg,—tall, fair, elegant, with nobly formed features.
The hall is packed; only with difficulty can one make one’s way from place to place. A large number of those present have already taken their seats at two or three long tables which run from one end of the hall to the other. With difficulty are places secured for us.
Hermann Heiberg introduces various colleagues to us, and these fetch still others. As often as a name celebrated in literature is mentioned, I am stirred by the same kind of joy that one feels when at a raffle a winning number is called. There is only one thing that is often bitterly disappointing,—sometimes the actuality so utterly fails to correspond to the mental picture that one has formed of the author in question. To be sure this picture was quite misty, indefinite, lineless as it were, and yet one regrets its annihilation. What, were these fragrant love-songs, these rapturous fancies, written by the brutal-looking stout man? And can it be that this awkward little bourgeois manikin is the author of those exquisitely elegant pictures of high life? What! Did that downy-bearded youth yonder who looks like a grocery clerk write those essays dripping with wisdom and experience?
Various figures and faces attract my attention, and I ask who they are. An imposing female apparition in black toilet with transparent sleeves—an interesting face: Frau Ida Boy-Ed, the author of Männer der Zeit. A small man with long white hair and benevolently beaming eyes in a beardless face; that is Paulus Cassel, an apostle of self-sacrificing philanthropy. There, leaning against a column,—a sharp contrast to the Apostle Paulus,—a dark Mephistophelian phenomenon: it is Fritz Mauthner the satirist. Near him is a pretty, animated young woman—it is the American Sara Hutzler, whose specialty is original child-scenes; the one who afterward married the dramatist Kainz, but died within a short time.