Letter from Edward Renouf to Anny Schey von Koromla

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22 March

My Annerl!

Your telegram and the two prior letters made me want to get straight on a plane and come. But it seems I may have an opportunity to make the journey for free on a freight steamer, and I’m still negotiating that in writing. If it falls through – and it might be ten to fourteen days before I can made a decision one way or the other – then I’ll take the next steamer to Genoa or Marseille. I’ll send you a telegram to let you know as soon as I know. Will you – and you alone – be there at the harbour to meet me?! The thought of seeing you again! The very idea burns and transfixes by turns, makes me dizzy with joy! Because you’re the dearest, loveliest, most natural, most fragrant woman in the world! I often look at your letters – your handwriting – and remember you sitting at your writing desk, your hand, your whole person – and in this way I’m able to detach you from the content of those letters, which is sometimes temporal and fleeting, and I can see you clearly before me, trusting, undefensive, safe in the knowledge that you belong to a free and living world that sees and understands a great many things. The suppression of so many of the people I’ve met here – not so much materially as by their own anxieties, pettiness, prejudices, mutual envy and ever brooding self-pity – always reminds me how divinely gifted you are with your Mozart soul. The beauty of a fully redeemed humanity will remain a very rare thing for millennia to come. Even for the rarest souls, the environment is wont to create conditions that darken the brightest clarity and thus shake even the strongest of certainties.

I feel awful for the Jews, the communists and all free-thinking people in Germany. It’s a remarkable state of affairs when one is compelled to look for consolation in the fact that people in China are dying in their hundreds of thousands as a result of hunger, flooding and war; that Bolivians and Paraguayans are shooting and poisoning one another with gas; that an earthquake in California has laid waste to homes and lives; and that people from every corner of the globe are wasting away in poverty. It’s too much, too much! One is no longer capable of genuine empathy. It’s beyond the bounds of reality, beyond the bounds of understanding and charitable compassion. The best one can do is to look out the window, where one will find the greater truth in the serene trunk of a tree, in a solitary blade of grass.

I hope your children haven’t been exposed to too much Nazi brutality. While the Jews are being driven out there, here they’re held in ever higher regard: the governor of New York, the new ambassador to Paris, the highest state attorney, two supreme court judges and the under-secretary to the treasury are all Jews, outstanding men, acknowledged as such and girded with honour.

The world will find equilibrium somehow. And a people is ennobled and strengthened by expulsion. If you decide that Germany is no place for your children, there’s always France, England, Spain, Italy and above all America. I’m sure we’ll discuss this at length!

All the very best to your children! And to you, Annerl –– –– !

Yours

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