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clochard arrived. Dünner introduced him to his director and suggested that the institute officially invite him to spend a month or two with them, as a resource for students whose French was good enough and who were working on the Lumpenproletariat and related subjects. The director thought this was a splendid idea and did so. But he advised those who had expensive coats to keep them in locked cupboards. The clochard is still in Frankfurt, occupying a guest room in the house of Dünner’s parents in the Bremer Strasse, wearing brand new clothes, behaving impeccably and no doubt inspiring some of the best work the institute has ever done.
    E NTRY 6: S ATURDAY , J UNE 25, 1927
    As I take my pen in hand before going to bed, I ask myself once again — for the hundredth time — why am I writing these things down? Why have I kept a diary since I was fourteen? Why is it as natural and necessary to me as breathing? I have no secrets. No, I would not object if Hermann looked at it. But it would never occur to him, just as it would never occur to me to look at his private correspondence.
    I am not writing for posterity. When I said this to Erich Fromm the other day at a dinner at the Institute for Social Research he laughed and said “Let me be the judge of that.” I suppose that is what a Freudian would say. Moreover, I have no illusion that it will be of any historical interest to anybody.
    But is it connected with my story writing? Do I keep a diary for purposes of doing five-finger exercises like Czerny’s? Perhaps. One of these days I hope I will be ready to offer my stories to a publisher.
    However, I do not think that is the reason. I have simply told myself that until I have written down whatever it is that I have experienced or observed or overheard — or even said myself — it has not really happened. It is real only when it is on paper. Let the Freudians make of this whatever they want. To say that I am writing things down in order to help me remember them is a crude simplification. I write things down in order to make them worth remembering in the first place.
    I am now ready to record the table talk at today’s déjeuner .
    There will not be many more occasions with Paul Hindemith before he leaves for Berlin, where he will teach composition at the Hochschule für Musik. It is a loss for us here in Frankfurt. He was only twenty when he became concertmaster at the Opera in 1915, and by 1917 he was already a prolific composer, having completed, among several other works, a cello concerto and his first string quartet. The same year also saw the first performance of his Songs for Soprano and Orchestra, with texts by Ernst Wilhelm Lotz and Else Lasker-Schüler. But I’ve listened to him perform cinema music, military music, operettas, dance music and even jazz.
    To please him I also invited my friend and fellow chamber musician Elise Gutmann. who I know never misses a concert by Hindemith’s Amar Quartet. Another guest was the cellist Wolfgang Herzog, who was strangely silent. I also invited Beate Ullmann from the Bauhaus in Dessau because I thought Paul would like her, even though she says she has a tin ear. She certainly has none of the unsmiling missionary zeal of those Bauhaus people who keep reminding us of Gropius’s 1919 manifesto, telling us that Bauhaus stands not merely for the new functional architecture and design but for an entirely new way of life. Beate wore the shortest skirt I have ever seen. One inch shorter and the men would have been in heaven! Good thing we were all sitting down while consuming our artichokes, our entrecôtes with Pfifferlinge and our raspberry crêpes . Minna has become highly skilled in spotting a half-empty glass and filling it without anybody noticing. That helps the conversation immeasurably.
    I was right: Beate and Paul liked each other. Was it true, she asked him, that he gave Gebrauchsanweisungen at the top of his scores, instead of the usual Allegro con brio or Andante