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Baden Baden, September 1, 1930
My most respected teacher and dearly beloved human being,
Since I have reason to distrust the legibility of my handwriting you must excuse my writing to you by typewriter instead of by hand, though I have not yet learnt to dictate, I manage quite a reasonable speed this way.
Your picture gives me great pleasure and was a surprise such as I rarely have. I did not realise that you knew what you meant to me personally.
Unfortunately I heard too late that you were awarded the Goethe Prize. As far as I have heard, all kinds of people consider it necessary to comment on this. If I may be allowed to judge by my experience then there is no one in the whole wide world who would deserve it more than you do. I was brought up in Goethe worship, but I did not understand him very well until I learnt about psychoanalysis. On the assumption that psychoanalysis, which for me is not a medical affair but something totally different, has enabled me better to ask the right questions I am turning to you, the new careful disguiser, in the hope that you will be allowed to tell the boy something at least of the best things you know.
When Faust is carried to heaven by the angels after his death a few words accompany this event which your disciple has pondered until his head was spinning round like a mill-stone. What bothers me, are the inverted commas round the expression ‘Whoever strives and toils can be saved by us’111 - they are in the Weimar edition even, in which the colon after ‘evil’ is left out. According to Eckermann Goethe told him that the enigma of Faust is solved in this riddle. Though I do not trust Eckermann very much - a family tradition - I cannot assume that he has misunderstood, particularly since he tells us at length in what follows the other remarks that Goethe made about it; this sound like genuine Eckermann, it only confirms that a mention may have been made of the importance of this passage. The inverted commas prove that the famous words ab