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Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
25. ii. 34
Dear Meister Arnold,
Work hard at the Erziehung vor Verdun, put into it all the sarcasm, cruelty and feeling of superiority that these recent months have produced within you; firstly because I am longing to read the book—best of all in the shade of a garden with Wolf1 and Jofi2 in the grass beside me—and I cannot
be sure how much more time I have. And secondly, because to my mind the people who should read your book are already shifting their interest from the war and the past to concentrate it exclusively upon the incredibly astonishing events to be expected in the immediate future. So see to it that you are not too late.
Our little bit of civil war was not at all nice.1 You could not go out without your passport, electricity was cut off for a day, and the thought that the water supply might run out was very unpleasant. Now everything is calm, the calm of tension, you might say; just like waiting in a hotel room for the second shoe to be flung against the wall. It cannot go on like this; something is bound to happen. Whether the Nazis will come, or whether our own home-made Fascism will be ready in time, or whether Otto von Habsburg will step in, as people now think. I have a story in the back of my mind which I cannot remember exactly; it's called ‘The Lady and the Tiger’ and in it a poor prisoner is waiting in a circus, not knowing whether they are going to let the wild beast loose upon him or whether the lady will appear who by choosing him for her husband will release him from punishment. The point of the story is that it ends without our knowing who has arrived, the lady or the tiger. This can only mean that for the prisoner it does not matter which has happened and that it is not worth telling us.
You are quite right in your expectation that we intend to stick it out here resignedly. For where should I go in my state of dependence and physical helplessness? And everywhere abroad is so inhospitable. Only if there really were a sa