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17 October 1909, Vienna, IX. Berggasse 19
Dear friend,
I am glad to find a number of things in your letter that call for an immediate answer. This is Sunday and I am entitled to rest from a hard week's work. Actually I have a great deal to tell you and discuss with you. Let's start with the business matters.
I hope and trust Friedländer hasn't got anything out of you. He is an unsavoury individual, even in his private affairs; he left his country because of some crooked business, he owes his clinic to his marriage to a woman he has since then divorced, and is now operating it for his former father-in-law, etc. All he wanted of us, it seems to me, was a kind of rehabilitation through our hostility. Now he is inconsolable because we have shown by our silence that we regarded him as unfit to duel with, so to speak. Either he has some specially beastly plan in visiting you, or he is stupid as well; can he think that we don't notice the contrast between the sweets he is dispensing and his public statements? In private the fellow deserves to be treated with all possible rudeness, in our literature we must simply ignore him; he is plain riffraff.
What shall we do about Forel? In his brief answer to me he says among other things that I have failed to answer his main question, whether or not I wish to join. I decided to wait for your letter and propose to you that we reply—either you or I can do the actual writing—to the effect that we feel no great need to cooperate as long as certain of his colleagues permit themselves every kind of insolence towards us and others seem silently to agree with them; that, having been absent, we do not know what decisions his Society has made and what obligations membership entails, and finally, that if he wishes to enlighten us on this, we shall see — Still, I know that Forel is a different type from our other opponents; I shall be glad to give in if you favour a milder approach.
Siemerling is just plain incompetent and, to judge by what