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Today we see Helene’s letter to Eva, the companion to the one she wrote to Harry which we saw in yesterday’s post.
Vienna, 5 September 1940
My much beloved little Eva child!
Your letter of August 20 arrived yesterday. It worked like a sleeping pill. It calmed me down but it didn’t cure me of the idée fixe that something might not be right with Harry. My first thought was that the reason his letters aren’t getting through is because of his drawings. But Harry often sends letters that are not illustrated, and so that wasn’t really the right idea. It could really only be that he was perhaps injured – something like this sometimes happens with drivers or chauffeurs. Or maybe he is sick in some other way. In any case, I consider it highly unlikely that all his letters have been lost and I will not feel at peace until I get a handwritten letter from him and I am holding it in my hands.
Now I know about the internship you have in the hospital. How is it going? Are you just going there a few hours and continue to stay with Bertha, or are you staying overnight in the hospital? Your first jobs will be things like doing the washing and such. Maybe that will make the job easier for you. I have not tortured you when you at one point were just harum sacrum. I didn’t look the other way when some of our house help did things like that. I am very excited about your new handwriting. I could read your letter easily without having to apply poetic license. Keep doing it that way and maybe you could give calligraphy lessons and then your vacation bank account will swell to an unimaginable size. I am very impressed with your letters. I take my hat off to you with every letter. Hedy would say “very competent and she knows a thing or two!” [literally: “not stupid at all”]
Our renters moved in yesterday. A middle-aged married couple. He used to be a foreign correspondent for foreign languages for a former major bank and she is a virtuoso pianist with a great inventory of sheet music. However, she doesn’t have a piano. Isn’t that strange? When the grand piano is gone from the house, the neighbors have a vacation. In any case, we are trying to stay out of the way which is kind of a difficult feat when there are blackouts. In spite of the fact that we all have to use the kitchen and the bathroom, we have established practical house rules so that we probably will not bother each other much. You cannot imagine what kinds of things can make for friction in a living situation. It may be that when we cram together a household of people who don’t even know each other in one apartment, it can lead to arguments much more easily when there are different kinds of people and temperaments. For example, a friend of mine is renting from someone in the same building where she used to have her own apartment. She said that her landlady greeted her with the “Götz quotation.” And when she did not answer, the landlady wanted her to pay 5 Reichspfennigs because she had to send the interest to the property management company by using a form that cost 20 Reichspfennigs. Isn’t that lovely?
I received a letter today from the Berlin Trading Company: “we are communicating to you without obligation and subject to revocation on the part of our client that we have been instructed by the Bank of America N.T. & S.A. San Francisco to give you 100 marks from your registration credit due to Lowell.” Etc. etc. There is a notation on the form approving this:
3) name of the person sending the money (sponsor)
Permanent place of residence:
Exact Address:
Citizenship:Since I do not know if Eva, Harry, or maybe the Zentners were the ones who did this, I am going to put both of your addresses. Could you imagine how happy I was about this? Since Everl didn’t write anything about this in your last letter, maybe it is a surprise to you too. I hope you can explain this to me. I have the feeling that the transfer will not go very smoothly. Questions about this should maybe not be asked. We’ll see!
Kisses, kisses, kisses and greetings to everyone.
Helen
Although Eva continues to be a reliable correspondent, Helene still has heard nothing from her son since June 10. She would like to think that the letters have been confiscated because he included illustrations (see the only example we have of his “Illustrated News Monthly” in the June 6 post). She fantasizes that he has gotten into a car crash – my understanding is that at one point Harry drove produce trucks for the Levy-Zentner company in Sacramento.
If Harry was working in Sacramento during the summer, he may not have written often (or at all?) – he was far away from his nagging sister. In the 1960s when we lived in San Francisco and Harry and his family lived in Berkeley, my mother did not call her brother often because at the time it was a long-distance call. I would imagine that the tolls to call Sacramento in 1940 would have felt exorbitant and that Eva would not have called her brother except in an emergency. So she probably had little if any news to share with her parents about her brother.
Helene talks about Eva’s improved handwriting. Throughout her life, her writing was difficult to decipher – apparently it was her one low grade in school when she was a student in Vienna. Now and then I’ll write something indecipherable even to me and realize it looks exactly like my mother’s writing!
We get a sense of life in Vienna at this time. In order to pay the rent, they are forced to rent part of their apartment to strangers. In a different situation, these tenants might have become good friends — like Helene and Vitali, they were musical and multilingual. But in these difficult times, the only thing Helene wanted to do was keep out of their way so that they would be happy, pay the rent, and not make trouble.
Götz-Zitat, a “Götz quotation,” was a euphemism for a profane expression, also known as a “Swabian salute”, from (of course) a play by Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen.
They are no longer living in the Vienna of Helene’s youth – it had become a rude, mean place where bureaucracy and crassness ruled the day.