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In his cover letter, dated April 4, 1993 and addressed to Oskar Siebeck, the proprietor and director of the publisher J.C.B. Mohr, Drucker introduced himself as the "foreign affairs editor" of the newspaper Frankfurter General-Anzeiger, and as assistant in the international law seminar at the University of Frankfurt. He suggested his manuscript be published in the series Law and State in History and the Present, "as this series, with its great reputation and wide circulation, already seemed to me from the beginning to be the best place to publish. I also know that your publishing house, which ventured the publication of the only new edition of Stahl's principal work, is interested in this author and knows his importance."
On April 6, Oskar Siebeck answered Drucker's suggestion: "I am very much prepared to publish your piece in my series Law and State in History and the Present. However, for this collection I am already expecting a further manuscript, which I have already promised to adopt. That your work would then first be able to be published in the issue after next is not so unfavourable, in that it would then be the one-hundredth issue in the series. As such, an essay on Friedrich Julius Stahl would be especially welcomed by me."
"Clearly", remarked Drucker in retrospect in Adventures of a Bystander, "the people at Mohr, whom I had never met, felt the way I did. The book, I am happy to say, was understood by the Nazis exactly as I had intended; it was immediately banned and publicly burned. Of course it had no impact. I did not expect any. But it made it crystal-clear where I stood; and I knew I had to make sure for my own sake that I would be counted, even if no one else cared." (p.138)
The essay on Friedrich Julius Stahl appeared on April 26, 1933. Directly afterwards, Drucker left Germany. The correspondence between Drucker and the J.C.B. Mohr publishers, which is kept today at the publisher's archives in Tübingen, continued until the middle of September, 1933. The sender's addresses on Drucker's letters show his further stations after his departure from Germany: He first returned to Vienna to his parents' house in Kaasgraben 10, where on May 17, he requested the publisher to send a review copy to the magazine Prager Archiv (Prague Archive). On July 11, he wrote to the publisher from a hotel in Lancaster Gate in London and requested ten author's copies. On September 18, the sender's address on his letter was "40 Belsize Park Gardens, London NW3": Drucker requested ten further author's copies.
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Peter Drucker