You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Budapest, November 7, 1918
Dear Professor,
How often during the day do I think: I must share that with you. But the same day still brings so much of the improbable—often of the unbearable—that I again lose the desire to write. My mood changes direction like a weather vane. Hardly have I begun to adapt painfully to the imminent dismemberment of the country of Hungary and commenced to seek a substitute for the lost ideal in the promised social upheaval and the liberal development which is to be expected from it: when already the news about the plundering in the province, which is mostly directed against Jews who have become rich and village notaries (because they mistreated the people), caused the ground under my feet to shake. Hardly had order been halfway restored when news came of the demeaning treatment of my co-nationals on all the country's borders—and the patriotic mourning was rekindled.—Your prophecy about our imminent proletarianization has come true—but the magnates and the capitalists are now hovering in the same danger. If Bolshevism gets its way in Germany, then the collapse of the entire civilzation of the world is unavoidable—France, England, America, and Japan will also get their turn, and an epoch of brutalization and infantilization will confront the world. We are living—nebbish—in a great time!1
It is difficult, like an Archimedes, to continue to work on one's scientific circles.2 Scientifically, things aren't going at all—at most I am able to handle the practice. I reported sick at the hospital, but I am active at home all day. I am totally sick of the military! The plundering of foreign troops marching through and the treatment that Oli's troop was subjected to is completely based on mutuality. All concepts of comradeship, propriety, decency got lost these days—i.e., their absence is only now actually coming to the fore. I don't grant the French, those scoundrels, their victory. They don't behave nobly, the way victors should, but rather impudently