Chapter 61Back in the TempioWIEDER IM TEMPIO

draft

Machine translation, not yet checked. This chapter is a raw AI-assisted draft made from the public-domain German. Expect mistakes of fact and of tone; it is here to make the work readable in English, not to be quoted.

📖 This chapter with the German alongside →

For the opening in 1911 I had ordered and paid 1,500 marks for artistic catalogues. A thousand of them had already been used up; two thousand had been printed, produced and sent out with a new list of pictures (the Angkor Wat pictures from Cambodia were now in it too) and the note: “After the Robbery.”

But the visitors to the exhibition came ever more sparsely. In the end I had to resign myself to it. After all the repairs there was not much money left over for further advertisements. All the same I was happy that the Tempio had risen again at all.

And Johanna went. How much I had dreaded it. But it went well enough after all. The charwoman had always done all the rough work anyway.

This time the children's visit was a particular pleasure. They cooked for themselves and delighted in being able to do exactly as they pleased with all my fine stores.

But I wanted to make a little journey all the same, in that autumn and winter1 — to Tunisia and Algeria. “It doesn't stretch round the whole world any more, I suppose,” Sudermann teased me.

Well, I was to come to know inexhaustible wonders “only” in Tunisia and Algeria too. After seven months I brought back many pictures, two new novels2 and a servant out of the Sahara desert. But I must tell it in order.

Notes

Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.

↑in that autumn and winter — Autumn 1913. She never says so; the housekeeper's leaving date says it for her. Chapter 59 has Johanna give notice “übers Jahr, am 1. Juni” — a year ahead, to the day — and chapter 59 falls in 1912, after the Asian journey that five independent dates fix to 1911–12. So the “And Johanna went” two paragraphs above is 1 June 1913, and the autumn that follows it is the autumn of 1913. Seven months in Tunisia and Algeria brings her home around May 1914, a few weeks before the war that chapter 73 opens on. This is the last of her great journeys, and she set out on it with no idea that it was.
↑two new novels — She names neither, here or anywhere else in the memoir. Two novels written out of a seven-month journey, and not a title between them. Neither has been identified in this project; the only book of hers we have found published after this journey is Yoshiwara (1920). Whether they were finished, placed with a publisher, or lost with everything else in the war years is an open question, and the publishers' announcements of 1913–14 are where to start.