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329F
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
21 December 1917
Dear Friend,
I am glad to hear that you are able to make any plans at all for the future. If I can do anything to help, I shall gladly do so. But a strong feeling warns me against writing to Bonhoeffer. If I express the thoughts that go with it, they are the following: I find nothing particularly hopeful in your account of your conversation with him. I doubt whether personal intervention by me will do more good than harm, and I am reluctant to get in touch with a stranger from whom I am not sure even of receiving at least the usual courtesies. Even Kraus, who is perfectly amicable towards me, could not bring himself to answer one of the two letters I sent him. The course that the collaboration on his handbook has taken, can have had only a cautionary effect on me, even though I let myself be guided by consideration for his relations with you.
For these reasons I think it far preferable to write again to K., with whom the ice is already broken, and, picking up the thread of my pre-war letter to him, to try to persuade him to back you with B. I shall do so this week, though I do not think it will help much. I shall write to the effect that I know you not to be one of those who turn scientific opposition into personal animosity and thus damage the dignity of science (at any rate in our sense of the word!).
Otherwise I have no news. Is it really ten years? They were significant and rich in substance enough, though not always pleasant.
My greetings to you and yours
cordially, your
Freud