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Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
28. i. 34
Dear Meister Arnold,
I have long waited eagerly for your letter, so that I might reply, and I am delighted with it now that it has come, moving as it does from the central heating to the central problems of integration, from my son Oliver to your Bilanz. First of all about the last mentioned. I am eager to read it, now that I know you are cured of your unhappy love of your so-called Fatherland. Such a passion is not for the likes of us. I'm afraid that under the influence of our personal relationship you have talked too much about me in your book, and that would be harmful to you and of no use to me, for let us make no mistake, this day and age has rejected me and all I had to give, and acclamations will not cause it to revise its judgement. Probably my time will come but, I might add, for the moment it is past.
A few months ago I had an unpleasant experience with a journalist, an echo of which may come to your ears. That's why I am writing to you about it. Last October there visited me a Dr. Ludwig Bauer who was known to me from some unusually intelligent and perceptive articles on the political situation. When I learnt that he was Viennese, the son of a doctor, a friend of Arthur Schnitzler and Beer-Hofmann,1 I treated him as a friend and discussed the dangers and prospects of our situation with him. Fool that I was! A few weeks later the fellow published an article on Austria in several newspapers, reporting also his visit to me. He described how I, good old man that I am, highly regarded and helpless, trembling with fear, had seized him by both hands and had kept on repeating just the one question: ‘Do you think they will turn me out, do you think they will take my books away?’ I heard of this appeal to the sympathy of Europe through a letter to my daughter Anna from the Zurich