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25.xi.14
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
Dear Frau Andreas
Since a letter between Vienna and Göttingen at present takes six days, I hope you will not think it importunate of me to send so quick a reply. The offprint you asked for does not need to go through the censor and will no doubt have reached you already.
What you write gives me the courage to come in on another note. I do not doubt that mankind will survive even this war, but I know for certain that for me and my contemporaries the world will never again be a happy place. It is too hideous. And the saddest thing about it is that it is exactly the way we should have expected people to behave from our knowledge of psycho-analysis. Because of this attitude to mankind I have never been able to agree with your blithe optimism. My secret conclusion has always been: since we can only regard the highest present civilization as burdened with an enormous hypocrisy, it follows that we are organically unfitted for it. We have to abdicate, and the Great Unknown, He or It, lurking behind Fate will someday repeat this experiment with another race.
I know that science is only apparently dead, but humanity seems to be really dead. It is a consolation that our German people have behaved best in all this; perhaps because it is certain of victory. The tradesman faced with bankruptcy is always a swindler.
Our Wednesday evening meetings, whose value is reduced by your remark that if circumstances had been different you would have been present at them, now take place only twice a month. They pass off peacefully and somewhat superficially. Many members are busily engaged in war service; some have dropped out. I am working in private at certain matters which are wide in scope and also perhaps rich in content.33 After two months of inability to work my interest seems liberated again, and I feel very clearly that my mind has had a thorough rest.
Two of my sons34 are in the army, both still in artillery training in the provinces.
I send you my cordia