Months passed. Albert began to tire of Berlin. Every phase of the city’s
life, like the pages of a book conned too often, bored him. He yearned
for idealism, for truth, and because he could find neither he began to
scoff and blaspheme. Here, as elsewhere, sham and falsehood ruled life.
Politics, religion, literature, philosophy—a veritable Tower of Babel,
where no one understood the other and all were bent on building
something colossal, eternal. When he had first arrived here his zeal for
so many things was kindled, now it was waning, cooling, dying. He
suffered the pain of lost illusions, and that at an age when most people
commence to have illusions. Despite his keen mind he had not yet learned
that no one can see truth and live—peacefully. And he not only saw the
truth but he was unwise enough to shout it from the housetops. He always
took the world into his confidence, without realizing that one who gives
the world his confidence gets none in return.
The scales were falling off his eyes. The Salon, the literary
Bohemians—he saw the sham and sickly sentimentality of it all!
The Salon was but a nest of chattering parrots, where one repeated the
phrases and syllogisms dropped by Goethe, by Herder, by Hegel, by
Schelling. If these parrots had at least croaked their own tunes!
He was still attending the Round Table at Lutter and Wegner’s on
Charlottenstrasse, where the rising young poets were having heated
debates on literary topics. Every one of them had his shoulders in
readiness for the mantle of the Prophet of Weimar to fall upon him and
every one thought everybody else a mere pretender. And when they were
most animated, stimulated by drink and smoke, Albert sat in a corner,
neither drinking nor smoking, a strange gleam in his narrowed eyes, and
from time to time sent a shaft of irony or an arrow of wit through their
web of fancy phrases. When he did argue his colleagues scented arrogance
in his statements. He had an unfortunate manner of belittling his
opponents’ assertions and brushing them aside with a scoffing jest. They
were talking of romanticism as if the period was only beginning while he
was speaking of it as if it had ended. They persuaded themselves that
dreams were realities while he only wished to clothe the sordidness of
life in the garb of romance. When he persisted they could not see the
difference.
He was also at variance with them on political issues. They spoke of the
radical democracy of Ludwig Börne while he believed in a democracy of
Government based on justice, with an aristocracy of achievement in all
walks of life. When Krebsfleisch accused Albert of aristocratic
tendencies he retorted that he had more respect for an industrious
aristocrat than for a coarse, drunken, lazy plebian poet who abused the
nobility at Lutter and Wegner’s and then went to his lodgings to write a
cringing, begging letter to a son of the nobility. Krebsfleisch was
silenced but had become Albert’s mortal enemy. Without direct accusation
Albert had revealed Krebsfleisch to himself. When people told him that
Krebsfleisch was slandering him he only smiled and said Krebsfleisch was
a genius and geniuses never had any sense of gratitude.
He again found himself almost alone, strolling along _Unter den Linden_,
visiting cafés, reading, thinking suffering from headaches, and when in
the throes of pain writing love songs. He wrote love songs because he
craved love and had it not. When he had no one to love he was dreaming
of love.