1843

(JS) Marie wrote to Moritz of Otto: 'I have never seen anybody express his lack of faith or rather pantheism so freely and clearly... his bottomless boredom and emptiness... He was very upset, was sometimes red in the face but could not get anywhere... a certain shyness before the blue haze of his image of God.' (KL) In 1843 Marie wrote: 'His fine carriage, his brilliance, both internal and external, attract me more and more. But when I am with him I always feel that I am skating on thin ice and might go through at any moment.'

Marie wrote to a friend: 'Otto B no longer shows his face in Zimmerhausen; very good because dear, good Moritz [her fiancé] could not survive the comparison. That he stays away out of magnanimity I do not believe but because he has something else in mind.'

He wrote: 'I love contact with women but marriage is a dubious proposition and my experiences have made me think twice. I feel partly comfortable, partly bored and very chilled in my spirits, and as long as I can hold out, I will... I am toying with the idea of playing the Asian for a few years to bring a change in the stage design of my comedy and smoke my cigars on the Ganges instead of on the Rega'. He did not go.

Leopold von Gerlach diary: nothing is able to stand against 'the always freshly blowing wind of the Zeitgeist'. There are some attempts to resist but: 'What can these little manoeuvres possibly achieve against the onward pressing Zeitgeist which, with satanic cleverness, wages an unceasing and systematic war against the authority established by God.' Metternich (1844) talked similarly: 'Out of the storms of our time, a party has emerged whose boldness has escalated to the point of arrogance. If a rescuing dam is not built to contain the streaming flood, then we could soon see even the shadow of monarchical power dissolve.'