13 - Dear Little Whore: Personal and Professional Turmoil (1909)

Summary

BACK IN NUREMBERG after his brief holiday respite in Dachau, Eisner ran the usual year-end retrospectives in the Tagespost. Pride of place was accorded Georges Weill's two-part article on Germany's woeful foreign policy in 1908, citing in particular the kaiser's Daily Telegraph interview and the “one defeat after another” that national prestige suffered from Bülow's inept meddling in Morocco. Tuesday, 5 January, Eisner drafted a proposal to Vorwärts Press in Berlin. His resolve “to withdraw from all editorial endeavors” and to devote himself to literary pursuits was impracticable at present, but he would devote “every spare moment” to the multivolume overview of world literature he had been invited to provide. He ventured that the undertaking would attract considerable interest, as no “cultural-social history of literature” existed. In addition, he was working on a history of the nobility and planned a continuation of Das Ende des Reichs, a project he had discussed with Comrade Bernhard Bruns. The latter he could deliver by 1 July 1912. Moreover, he had made considerable progress on a study of Fichte, a project that had occupied him for some years already, and he would gladly forward copy of the lecture series on Marx he was to present in the spring.

That night Eisner wrote to Belli from his room at the Schneider Hotel that he intended to meet with his wife the next afternoon to finalize some arrangement. Lisbeth wanted to leave Nuremberg, and he thought that she would do well to relocate to a small town such as Jena. “I will renounce everything, even the children. I know now that they love me but will go with their mother.” Once his family vacated the field, he saw no reason that Belli should not be with him in Nuremberg. “Then in a few months I shall present the people with the choice of losing me or having me and you.” He announced that he would arrive in Munich late Friday afternoon and asked her to take the train from Dachau to meet him at the main station. They could then ride back to Dachau together, “where we might hope to find a nest for us two.” On the twenty-sixth he would begin a tour of the electoral district in Dessau, but would visit her the weekend prior to departure.