Ferdinand Lassalles Tagebuch is a published edition of the youthful diary of Ferdinand Lassalle. It is not a retrospective memoir but a dated, day-by-day record kept by a schoolboy, and its central interest lies in its intimate self-scrutiny, its account of adolescent daily life, and its picture of a young man negotiating family expectations, reading, friendship, money, and social rank.
The volume’s editorial frame explains that the diary is authentic and written throughout in Lassalle’s own hand. The editor states that he made no additions to the text, but that he omitted indifferent material — including detailed gambling accounts — softened a few harsh expressions, and removed or reduced to initials the names of persons about whom Lassalle wrote with unusual severity. This editorial note is important because it presents the diary as a documentary text, even if selectively edited.
The diary proper opens with a programmatic entry dated 1 January 1840, in Breslau. Lassalle announces that the pages are intended to record all his actions, his mistakes, and his good deeds. He promises not only to set down what he did but also to give the motives behind his actions. His stated purpose is self-knowledge: by reading his own diary attentively and without self-flattery, he hopes to learn his own character, much as a reader learns the characters in a novel from their actions and conversations. He speaks of a double moral purpose — the shame of recording an unjust act and the greater shame of later rereading it — and also of the pleasure of recalling, years afterward, what one has enjoyed or suffered. The opening is thus both confessional and moralistic, and it sets the tone for the entries that follow.
The diary then settles into short, often concrete daily entries. Lassalle records waking after a festive night, visiting a friend’s business premises, complaining of money troubles after losing nearly all his money at cards, refusing an offered loan, breakfasting, reading a newspaper, playing billiards, playing chess, attending school, and going on outings with friends. These entries are not polished set pieces; they are the ordinary notations of a young man about town and at school. They show a social world of friends, acquaintances, cafés, billiard rooms, and family rooms, and they show Lassalle observing himself within it — now pleased with his conduct, now embarrassed, now determined to do better.
A recurring theme is reading and paternal authority. In one scene, Lassalle’s father enters while he is reading a novel and rebukes him for spending the whole day with romances. Lassalle asks whether he should not try to become familiar with literature and belles-lettres; his father calls this “lazy stuff” and forbids it. Lassalle then quietly fetches Shakespeare and reads. When his father asks what he has, Lassalle answers “Shakespeare” and points out that this is not a novel. His father retorts that he has read enough poets and should take up a written exercise or a Latin or Greek poet. Lassalle defends Homer and Shakespeare as equally great in different genres; his father insists on the difference between Greek and German. Lassalle notes with irritation that, in his father’s view, one does not read Homer to refine the mind and heart or to admire the poet’s genius, but only to learn Greek. The episode is characteristic of the diary’s interest in generational conflict and in Lassalle’s sense of his own intellectual seriousness.
Another significant passage concerns a former pupil who had been in the Prima but left the Gymnasium for the merchant class. The man had read Homer and Cicero, Sophocles and Euripides, yet now found himself subordinate to boys who had left Quarta and who were younger than he. He received little or no salary, while his younger brother, who had left school earlier, was doing respectably in business. The man wept bitter tears when he was placed behind a much younger and more ignorant person; Homer and Demosthenes and the seven wise men of Greece could not console him. Gradually his grief turned into mockery, the most terrible mockery; his tears dried, his lips formed a convulsive smile, and his heart grew cold. Lassalle hears this silently and recognizes his own possible fate. He fears that if he does not leave soon and get through the “Bursche” years as young as possible, he may find himself, at nineteen or twenty, familiar with the Greeks and Romans and the heroes of the Iliad, yet still a subordinate to someone his own age or younger whose only advantage is that he knows and feels nothing. This passage gives the diary one of its sharpest themes: the fear of social humiliation and the tension between classical education and practical advancement.
The diary also records the small texture of leisure and friendship: Sunday visits, outings to nearby places, billiards permitted again from 1 April, and the ordinary pleasure of being with companions. These entries keep the book close to the rhythms of a fifteen-year-old’s life in 1840, even as the writing repeatedly turns back on itself in acts of self-assessment.
The edition identifies the opening section by the heading “Schülerzeit und -lust in Breslau. Januar bis Mitte April 1840,” and it announces a second section, “Der Handelsschüler in Leipzig,” to be preceded by its own introduction. The surviving text presented here is therefore the Breslau schoolboy’s diary: a record of self-examination, family friction, reading, friendship, gambling, and early ambition, written in short dated entries and framed by an editor who insists on its authenticity while acknowledging his selective treatment of the manuscript.
