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II.xii.1927
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
My dear Lou
Forgive me for not having answered before this: my unbusiness-likeness and laziness are growing on me. Everything you wrote has
interested me very much. You are always able to add depth and to connect things; I am happy if I succeeded in isolating something.
Our difference of opinion with regard to humour has reminded me that I was not able to solve one of its enigmas, i.e., why women give vent to or appreciate humour so much more rarely than men. You don't want to come to the aid of the Almighty either. But my wrath was not so much directed against him as against the gracious Providence and moral world-order for which he is, to be sure, responsible. Nor do I pursue by any means all illusions, but why should one cling precisely to the one which makes such mock of reason?
Glad to hear that the K … ers really did arrive. Not every arrow reaches its mark. I trust that this time you have not entirely forgotten your own interests. I am not going to ask you for an answer, so that I shall not get upset. In the last few days I have been trying to get poor Ernst Toller199 to go to you, but he could not bring himself to leave Berlin.
I am in fairly good shape; my old mother (92/3!) begins to get a bit shaky. Anna is splendid, good and intellectually independent [….]
With warm greetings to you and your old man,
Yours,
Freud
Ernst Toller, 1893-1939, Expressionist poet and dramatist of socialist tendency; he played a leading part in the Bavarian Soviet Republic in the spring of 1919. In 1926 he returned (disappointed) from a visit to the U.S.S.R. He committed suicide in the U.S. in 1939. It is not clear whether Freud had in mind an analysis of Toller by Lou A.-S.