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Freud was not an author who wrote material to be put away in a drawer. His writing was for publication. His constant concern that his works should remain accessible on the book market contrasted with his lack of interest in their preliminary stages. No sooner did he have the printed version in his hands than he threw away the handwritten papers from which it was made. It was not until 1914 that he became accustomed to preserve these documents, and then only because it had been pointed out to him that they might one day provide some pocket money for his grandchildren.1 These manuscript sheets with their harmonious, weblike pattern of lines, as a rule virtually free of corrections, are of unusual beauty. Almost all of them are in fact fair copies—that is, in each case final versions.
It is therefore surprising, in the midst of such a classical landscape of manuscripts, to stumble across a jagged quarry. I refer to the part of the literary estate comprising the papers in Freud’s hand for his last book, Moses and Monotheism,2 which, in exile in London not long before his death, he had Allert de Lange publish in Amsterdam. One reason for my perusal of these manuscripts at the beginning of 1988 was that I was interested in the ‘first version’ described as long ago as 1941 by the editors of the Gesammelte Werke, in their foreword to the seventeenth volume, as a text that had been preserved and might possibly be ‘put before the public at a later date’.3 As we know from Freud’s letters, the title of this version, which dates from 1934, was Der Mann Moses: Ein historischer Roman [The Man Moses: A Historical Novel]. I had long been fascinated by, in particular, the curious subtitle and wanted to investigate in what respects the early version differed from that published by Freud.4
At that time I presumed that the Moses manuscripts would conform to the model described above and comprise, on the one hand, the fair copy of the printed version and, on the other, the written text of