This was just at the time of “the revolution in literature,” and we followed with the liveliest sympathy the phases of that revolution. Conrad, Bleibtreu, Alberti—we read all that they wrote and were amazed at their audacities. A _Moderne_ was beginning to show its head—which, to be sure, has since been thrown on the rubbish heap by the very most modern _Modernen_. And in the plastic arts too the first symptoms of the Secession began to be distinguishable. Everywhere there was fermentation.—After all, there is at every period a newest thing which surprises and puzzles, is antagonized, wins, and soon becomes _vieux jeu_. That the present phase seems to one to be so unprecedentedly subversive of all that has been supreme, is mere illusion. In October of this year, the first year of our return, the Congress of the Authors’ Union held its session in Berlin. In our capacity as members of the Union we were invited to be present, and we needed no second invitation. I preserved in my diary a few pictures of this congress—the first which I had ever attended in my life—and later turned them to account in my _Schriftstellerroman_. On the evening before the first business meeting, a “gathering and informal greeting of the members of the Union” took place in the Kaiserhalle. At the entrance of the assembly hall, from which comes the loud buzz of hundreds of voices speaking at once, stands the host, that is to say, the President of the Congress, to receive the guests. That is Hermann Heiberg,—tall, fair, elegant, with nobly formed features. The hall is packed; only with difficulty can one make one’s way from place to place. A large number of those present have already taken their seats at two or three long tables which run from one end of the hall to the other. With difficulty are places secured for us. Hermann Heiberg introduces various colleagues to us, and these fetch still others. As often as a name celebrated in literature is mentioned, I am stirred by the same kind of joy that one feels when at a raffle a winning number is called. There is only one thing that is often bitterly disappointing,—sometimes the actuality so utterly fails to correspond to the mental picture that one has formed of the author in question. To be sure this picture was quite misty, indefinite, lineless as it were, and yet one regrets its annihilation. What, were these fragrant love-songs, these rapturous fancies, written by the brutal-looking stout man? And can it be that this awkward little bourgeois manikin is the author of those exquisitely elegant pictures of high life? What! Did that downy-bearded youth yonder who looks like a grocery clerk write those essays dripping with wisdom and experience?