1 March 1942, evening

Special guest: Himmler

In the eyes of a woman, the finest of dresses at once loses its charm – if she sees another woman wearing one like it. I’ve seen a woman suddenly leave the opera at the sight of a rival who had entered a box wearing the same dress as herself. “What a cheek!” she said, “I’m going!”

In the pleasure a woman takes in rigging herself out, there is always an admixture of some trouble-making element, something treacherous – to awaken another woman’s jealousy by displaying something that the latter doesn’t possess. Women have the talent, which is unknown to us males, for giving a kiss to a woman-friend and at the same time piercing her heart with a well-sharpened stiletto. To wish to change women in this respect would be ingenuous: women are what they are. Let’s come to terms with their little weaknesses. And if women really only need satisfactions of that sort to keep them happy, let them not deprive themselves, by any means! For my part, I prefer to see them thus occupied than devoting themselves to metaphysics. There’s no worse disaster than to see them grappling with ideas. In that respect, the point of disaster is reached by women painters, who attach no importance to beauty – when it’s a question of themselves!

Other women are extremely careful of their appearance, but not beyond the moment when they’ve found a husband. They’re obsessed by their outlines, they weigh themselves on exact scales – the least gramme counts! Then you marry them, and they put on weight by the kilo!

Without doubt, when we mock at women’s artifices, they could pay us back by pointing out our own coquetry – our poor, male coquetry. It’s true that we shave, that we get our hair cut, that we, too, try to correct the mistakes of nature!

When I was a child, only actors and priests had shaven faces. At Leonding, the only civilian whose face was beardless was regarded as the most extreme of eccentrics. The beard gives character to some faces, but it’s easier to descry the true personality of a shaven man. By the way, the evolution that has taken place in the sense of sobriety seems to accord with the laws of nature. Hasn’t man gradually, through the ages, cleared away some of his hair?

In the countries where women are more numerous than men, the female has recourse to all kinds of methods to dispossess her rivals. It’s a form of the spirit of conservation, a law of the species. The gentlest woman is transformed into a wild beast when another woman tries to take away her man. The bigger the element of femininity in a woman, the further is this instinct developed. Must one regard this innate savagery as a fault? It is not rather a virtue?

The state of society in which woman was regarded merely as a slave (as is still the case in certain tribes) would be, if we returned to it, a clear regression for humanity. But it’s not the only possible state. In prehistoric times, matriarchy was certainly a fairly widely spread form of social organisation. When all’s said, a people never dies out for lack of men. Let’s remember that after the Thirty Years’ War polygamy was tolerated, so that it was thanks to the illegitimate child that the nation recovered its strength. Such particular situations cannot give rise to a legal regulation – but as long as we have in Germany two and a half million women vowed to celibacy, we shall be forbidden to despise the child born out of wedlock.

Social prejudices are in the process of disappearing. More and more, nature is reclaiming her rights. We’re moving in the proper direction. I’ve much more respect for the woman who has an illegitimate child than for an old maid. I’ve often been told of unmarried women who had children and brought these children up in a truly touching manner. It often happens amongst women servants, notably. The women who have no children finally go off their heads.

It’s somewhat striking to observe that in the majority of peoples the number of women exceeds that of men. What harm is there, then, in every woman’s fulfilling her destiny? I love to see this display of health around me. The opposite thing would make me misanthropic. And I’d become really so, if all I had to look at were the spectacle of the ten thousand so-called elite. Luckily for me, I’ve always retained contacts with the people. Amongst the people, moral health is obligatory. It goes so far that in the country one never reproaches a priest for having a liaison with his servant. People even regard it as a kind of guarantee: the women and girls of the village need not protect themselves. In any case, women of the people are full of understanding; they admit that a young priest can’t sweat his sperm out through his brain.

The hypocrites are to be found amongst the ten-thousand-strong élite. That’s where one meets the Puritan who can reproach his neighbour for his adventures, forgetting that he has himself married a divorcée. Everybody should draw from his own experience the reasons to show himself indulgent towards others. Marriage, as it is practised in bourgeoise society, is generally a thing against nature. But a meeting between two beings who complete one another, who are made for one another, borders already, in my conception, upon a miracle.

I often think of those women who people the convents – because they haven’t met the man with whom they would have wished to share their lives. With the exception of those who were promised to God by their parents, most of them, in fact, are women cheated by life. Human beings are made to suffer passively. Rare are the beings capable of coming to grips with existence.