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Vienna XIX, Strassergasse 47
May 18, 1936
Dear Stefan Zweig
I hope you will forgive me for not answering you before. The demanding and exhausting days are over at last.
I reread your letter before writing this. It rings so simple and true that I almost forgot it was written by a master of style. It nearly convinced me of my importance. Not that I doubt the content of truth in my doctrines, but I find it difficult to believe that they could exert a demonstrable influence on the development of the immediate future. As a result I appear to myself much less important than you represent me, and prefer to dwell on what I recognize with far greater certainty, namely your extremely kind sentiments displayed by the trouble you took for the celebration of my birthday. The beautiful address 1 which you and Thomas Mann composed together and Mann's speech 2 in Vienna were the two events which almost reconcile me to having grown so old. For, although I have been exceptionally happy in my home, with my wife and children and in particular with one daughter who to a rare extent satisfies all the expectations of a father, I nevertheless cannot reconcile myself to the wretchedness and helplessness of old age, and look forward with a kind of longing to the transition into nonexistence. Whatever happens, I am unable to spare my loved ones the pain of separation.
The exceptional position I occupy with you will then also come to an end. For I believe that in the gallery of remarkable human beings which you have set up in your panopticon—as I sometimes jokingly call it—I am certainly not the most interesting, but nevertheless the only living person. Perhaps it is to this fact that I owe so much of the warmth of your sympathy. For with the biographer