(“I don’t understand why no newspaper broaches the ‘hara-kiri; hypothesis. Moreover if he really did die of a cold, that would really be the greatest conclusion to the drama, truly Shakesperean”.)

(“The darkness that lies over this death will probably never be lifted. The man has escaped me. What remains for me is an emptiness and a kind of incapacity to ‘understand’ things, to grasp them as real. Of pity for him, nothing, to be honest, at most for his wife who, truth be told, has also been lucky. I would rather have dueled with him. It would have been cleaner than this melodramatic conclusion. Now an odor remains, an atmosphere that will only slowly dissipate. If one of us had fallen, then at least the entire stink would be gone. What is ugly about life is that it too often provides uneasy half solutions that are so seldom pure and tragic ones. In the end one has only raised more dust where one wished to make a clean sweep.”)

(Harry Kessler to Hugo von Hofmannstahl, February 1907).