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Haifa, Carmel, Beth Moses
6. 6. 34
Dear Father Freud,
I have long been meaning to answer your sympathetic letter, but we have been so busy getting our flat ready. Things are making progress in spite of a hundred and one difficulties, and in the middle of it all we had to go to Tel Aviv to visit the Levantine Fair, which is well worth seeing. And now I am back here again, while Dita is still in Tel Aviv, and I have agreed to give a lecture this evening on ‘The
Psychological Consequences of Deracination’. So I am not really in a letter—writing mood. But for the last few days your marvellously paternal second letter, and with it Frau Lou's enclosure, have left me no peace. Nobody who means as much to me as you has ever tried so hard to dissuade me from a plan and never has it been so in vain. You are right in all you say. My opinion about historical truth coincides entirely with yours. I have absolutely no intention of making up, of fabricating or reconstructing a Nietzsche. My aim is to fathom and describe the terrible gap which exists between the character and the writings of a German and to confront the brother Fritz with his sister Lisbeth, with Hitler always looming like a shadow over her. I would like to describe the man's flight and his capture, his soft, gentle timidity and his thunderous words which anticipate the Nazi era. I would like to confront him with Overbeck and I would like to have Jacob Burckhardt sit in judgement on him. I would like to depict his enjoyment of the landscape and to describe the nightmare his contemporaries meant to him. He was never anything but a philologist of genius—among words he was always happy, words satisfied him completely. But, alas, that he should have turned them in such a way that they stirred other people into action—and that is exactly what they did do. I would like to establish a link between present—day Germany and his doctrines; I would like to transfer my rage, hate and contempt into his person and share his flight i