Letters from Helfenberg

‘It is hard just now to have two Vaterländer’, wrote Johanna Duke, née von Lippe, from Helfenberg in Saxony to her husband William in Cambridge in August 1914. This is a sentence that leads us to the core of the twin publication ‘Letters from Helfenberg / Briefe aus Helfenberg [Hille Verlag, Dresden]’: it was put together by a grandson of Johanna and William, John Falconer, who found in the attic of his deceased grandmother in Cambridge an extensive correspondence not only of the married couple but also between members of the dual national family that had arisen. He has expanded this with some recollections written down by the protagonists later, as well as his own explanations, which complement the documents and combine them into a kind of continuous narrative. Both books are richly illustrated, with historical and more recent photos, picture postcards, envelopes, telegrams, examples of postal censorship, drawings, manuscripts, announcements, newspaper cuttings, in the English version with even a few more than in the German. The period of correspondence covers both world wars and the years before and after each, a time that was particularly tense for German-English relations. The aim of the publication was to use these letters to paint ‘a vivid picture of social and family life in the shadow of great international events’ (book cover) and thus ‘to shed light on the cultural, social and political events to which they refer.’ (p. 6). It has certainly succeeded in this. The catalyst for the family connection in question was another story, in a different way a typical one, that of Johanna’s sister, Gertrud von Lippe. As the eldest daughter of the family, this unmarried woman, at the time over thirty years old and in poor health, received permission from her father in 1909 to spend some time in Berlin, where she wanted to learn English and French and attend lectures at the Humboldt Academy. There she joined an international circle of young people, which also included the English student William Duke: they went to exhibitions, concerts and theatre performances together, went on city walks and excursions. Gertrud and William remained in close contact by letter even after the end of her stay in Berlin, and in 1910 she invited him to her parents’ house in Helfenberg – where he met her younger sister Johanna. For Gertrud von Lippe the stay in Berlin and the acquaintances she made there would probably have been her last chance to get married and thus leave her parents’ home – this was now over. When she accompanied Johanna on her first trip to England to see her fiancé in 1912, the already physically weak woman became seriously ill. Nevertheless, even after her return from England, she remained part of the network of letter writers between the von Lippe and Duke families and was in close correspondence with both her sister and her brother-in-law. A sentence from Gertrud’s last letter before her early death in 1922 is also what John Falconer considers a reason for publishing the entire volume of letters: ‘It would be a sad thought for me, if I were completely forgotten by the whole world.’ (pp. 6, 269) Of course these personal documents, or the printed excerpts from them, are less about individual lives than about the close interweaving of private and public, of individual fates and great political developments. Johanna and William’s engagement was already marked by increasing political tensions between their two countries, and their first years of marriage were characterized by an atmosphere of war and then also by its reality (they married in 1913 in the Dresden Frauenkirche). That did not just have an impact on postal traffic, postal censorship and travel opportunities, but led to such strange situations as Johanna, married in England, congratulating her German brother Fritz, who was awarded the Iron Cross for his service in the First World War. In the following long letter there are sentences like, ‘You can imagine that it hurts me if the English cannons are shooting at my own brothers. But I had to reckon with a conflict of this kind, and I’ve no reason to complain.’ (p. 137). In the course of the correspondence, in which the number of writers was gradually reduced by deaths (and which for long stretches was carried on only by Johanna and her brother Walther), readers learn about the situation in Germany during and after the First World War, as well as during the global economic crisis and inflation – especially the situation in agriculture, since the von Lippe family was a major tenant and lost the Helfenberg estate in 1930. They also read of the political unrest of the time, the beginning of Hitler’s rise to power and the years leading up to the start of the Second World War. Since evidently very few letters from England to Germany survived, we learn about events on the English side, such as the miners’ strikes of 1926 or the growing unemployment in Great Britain, particularly through Walther’s ‘German’ reaction to them. Related to this – and perhaps even more interesting for some – are various pieces of information about people’s lives, such as the electrification of residential buildings, about cars as an increasingly important means of transport, about the first transatlantic flights, the effects of particularly harsh winters on everyday life, and the knowledge of when the Hitler salute became mandatory and in what social contexts. Gifts were also sent regularly: tobacco, tea, and dried and tropical fruits to Germany, stollen and homemade sausage for Christmas to England. In 1935/36 one of the daughters of the German side of the family spent a year with the English side to go to school there and to learn English. The period of the Second World War and the post-war period are only recorded selectively, now mainly in letters from the generation of Johanna and Walther’s children. Besides the information contained in the exchange of letters, the use of language in them seems to me particularly interesting. The adoption of nationalistic rhetoric is always surprising, each time one comes across it, given that the family situation ought to preclude such a thing. An example of this is Gertrud’s letter from Germany to England in which she writes about the death of two of the von Lippes’ three brothers in the war, that they spent ‘so many sleepless nights on behalf of the Fatherland’ (p. 213) and speaks elsewhere of the pair of ‘hero brothers’ (p. 221). What was more to be expected was the mixture of both languages in the documents, whether because the current translation of a word such as ‘Heimweh’ was not suitable for expressing the feeling and its cultural charge, or whether it was due to a lack of linguistic competence: when Johanna and William’s older daughter travelled alone to Germany in 1935, she made a drawing of Dresden for her mother with the Augustus Bridge and Frauenkirche and inscribed it as follows: ‘In Erinnerung of your Heimatstadt, drawn in größter Eile to the Erstaunung and amusement of people along the Elbe’ (p. 468). Probably just as predictable as the mixture of languages, and yet particularly touching, are the various expressions of inner turmoil experienced above all by Johanna, after she moved from one country to another. During one of her visits to Helfenberg she wrote to her husband who had stayed behind in England: ‘the feeling of “Heimweh” in one’s own former home is something very extraordinary.’ (p. 249) – she was homesick for Cambridge. Also after William’s early death and her children growing up, she did not go back to Germany: she earned her living by teaching German at the university and married again in Cambridge. Significant therefore were her efforts to mediate and almost to conjure up friendship between the two countries. Thus she published a long article in the Dresdner Anzeiger (with the help of her brother) about the landing of the German airship ‘Graf Zeppelin’ in April 1930 in England, which contains sentences like: ‘Twelve years have passed, the bitterness of the war years has disappeared. It is not in the English nature to bear grudges. [...] In the circle of the spectators we heard nothing but admiration and a genuine appreciation of this example of German efficiency and German enterprise.’ (p. 364f.) And later, in view of the mutual destruction that was taking place in the Second World War she wrote: ‘I am hoping more and more that the United States of Europe will be the result of all this madness. However, there is a long path to go yet.’ (Johanna Duke, July 3, 1940, p. 413). The book is worth reading just for the sake of such clear-sighted sentences as this. That her grandson has published this book in both countries in the respective national language is all the more remarkable when you consider the additional effort involved in translation, editing and production. It is to be hoped that these books will be recognised as an important source of cultural history. Astrid Köhler Queen Mary University of London