Source: Hegel: The Letters, translated by Clark Butler and Christine Seiler with commentary by Clark Butler, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, © Purdue Research Foundation.
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden for Marxists.org, 2005.
Nuremberg, July 1, 1814
I cannot refrain from entrusting to High Councillor of Finance Roth a few lines addressed to you, my dear friend. He, by the way, will be able to give you a report of our bearable living conditions here. But there are so many great things either in the wind or already in place that one becomes talkative even where it is superfluous. Just as the Russians have been called “beasts of Liberation,” the organizational beasts are said to have long been chomping at the bit to fall on the hoped-for prey. Yet in recent times the lands have been so often reorganized through and through, and thus brought to such a scrawny orderliness, that very few flitches of bacon remain to be trimmed off them. ...
It is said that if the devil gets you by the hair you are his for eternity. I think what you have in mind for me is not that my hair should grow out into a bun, but rather that it should as soon as possible be torn out again and reorganized amiss if the opportunity should now present itself. I leave the matter to God, you, and your fair lady.
As he took leave of us today, I told Roth and his wife that the pleasure of his amicable presence included as well the delightful riches of making up, beyond his own immediate presence, the presence of half the dear circle of which he is a member; and thus that as he travels with his wife here to his homeland, he at once brings along a choice piece of real estate from my own homeland. ...
Yours, Hegel