3 3 6 D O C U M E N T 3 5 4 D E C E M B E R 1 9 2 8 354. From Fritz Haber Luxor, 29 December 1928 Dear Albert Einstein, I don’t want to leave here without having told you and your dear wife[1] in a proper letter how happy I was to receive your telegram and letter, and how grateful I am to you for not resenting the long time I was concerned only with myself. Since I separated from my second wife in the autumn of 1926, something in me has been broken.[2] It wasn’t that I saw the separation differently after it took place. I needed it to go on living. But the fact that I had led my earlier life in such a way that at the age of nearly 60[3] I could no longer endure my marriage and had to separate myself from my beloved children,[4] disturbed and humiliated me. Things have gotten bet- ter since I have had something vital to work on again. But to carry a remnant re- mains embarrassing and makes me doubly susceptible to tokens of warmth on the part of those whom I hold dear in the stillness. And it matters a great deal to me that you, dear Albert Einstein, have a good opinion of my usefulness and encourage me at the moments when I am out of sorts or more precisely on the long days when I am completely filled with the awareness of my superfluity and mediocrity. I sailed up the Nile with my eldest sister, my son Hermann and his wife, with his mother’s brother and my old, curious friend Friedrich Epstein.[5] It is very beautiful to spend a winter’s day in the sun on this strangely calm river with the temperature at 15ºC, disembarking here and there to see the remains from earlier millennia, which one gradually comes to understand, and to learn again how to sleep without barbiturates. This letter will arrive only very shortly before I do. May I come soon to visit you both and may I try to weave back together the threads of a close relationship? Ev- eryone comes to you and many to me and so it is hard for us to come to one another! I thank you once again and send my warm regards, and I wholeheartedly wish you, dear Albert Einstein, the complete bodily health that you have so long done without. Your friend, Fritz Haber
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