Bleib übrig, Zwilling

Confusion. I rummage through the drawer. The correspondence with my twin, usually neatly typed by us diligent secretaries, is bundled together, topped with photos from Leipzig, Warsaw, Amsterdam. I have never been able to part with this stack of paper; to destroy it would mean to annihilate a piece of life that has shaped me the most - no, not life itself, but its testimonies. I could still quote sentences from it from memory. Written in 1943 from a front operation in Warsaw: "One must be ashamed here to be German." I have never forgotten my shock at that sentence. Once again, the past catches up with me. The past. All of this still lives somewhere: intolerance, cruelty, indifference, fear. And hope. Still: hope.

How can one be seduced by Nazi propaganda? How can one learn from experience? In the book by Käthe Rülicke-Weiler, two young women from Leipzig provide a vivid picture of the past from 1943 to 1948 in their letters (supplemented by diary entries and historical documents) and show what it meant to have lived during that time. None other than Bertolt Brecht encouraged his collaborator Käthe Rülicke to realize this "book of letters." The book was edited by Heidrun Güttel and enriched with an afterword by Dr. Ute Pott, the director of the Gleimhaus in Halberstadt.