Last Letters Read online

  Kreisau, her former home, has become Krzyzowa, a Polish village in the former Eastern bloc, now part of an expanded Europe. Already during the communist period, Freya returned several times to the houses and graves dear to the family and felt that Helmuth, as an opponent of the Nazis, had also been a friend of Poland and even a communist government of Poland might agree to a memorial stone in Helmuth’s honor at Krzyzowa. While this was not granted prior to the fall of communism, 1989 brought democratic rule to both East Germany and Poland. The neighboring Polish and German governments wished to seal their new friendship and bury the enmity of the past with a Reconciliation Mass. They chose Krzyzowa as the place for this mass, which was celebrated by the prime ministers of West Germany and Poland on November 12, 1989, just three days after the fall of the wall in Berlin. The governments agreed to fund the restoration of the buildings on the former estate of the Moltkes, turning it into a site for youth exchange and conferences, which now brings people from all the nations of Europe together.

  Since 1990, the Kreisau Foundation for Mutual Understanding in Europe has been the umbrella under which the former estate has once again come to life and found a new purpose. With facilities for meetings, seminars, and informal gatherings as well as accommodations for about 140 people, the foundation is one of the success stories of the new European focus on Silesia. About 5,000 young people from all over Europe—chiefly from Poland and Germany—meet with their peers from other countries there every year, bridging the divides of language, religion, and politics. They learn in multiday sessions about the Kreisau Circle’s opposition not only to Nazi Germany but to communist dictatorships during the years of the Cold War. It is also the site of numerous meetings, seminars, and concerts for adults, making the estate a lively spot in southwestern Poland. For Freya, who worked closely with everyone connected to the project, this new incarnation of the former estate was the signal achievement of her old age and, traveling with a small backpack and one suitcase, she visited frequently well into her nineties. Built on the opposition to dictatorships, the foundation teaches young people to work together across national boundaries. With each encounter that it facilitates, the Moltkes’ former home encourages visitors to work for a democratic Europe.

  NOTES ON THE PRESENT EDITION

  The present edition of letters is translated from the abridged version edited by Helmuth Caspar and Ulrike von Moltke, published by C. H. Beck in Germany in 2013. The unabridged version contained 172 letters. In preparing the German version of the abridged correspondence, the editors largely reduced repetitions in the discussion of possible legal defense strategies, shortened lengthy discussions of Bible passages, and excised digressions on family affairs. With one exception, the editors also decided to omit the handful of censored letters that the couple had to write to avoid suspicion of the parallel, secret correspondence. This permitted a greater narrative coherence and brought into focus the heartbeat of Helmuth and Freya’s conversation, both of which we wished to preserve for the English reader as well. We have also introduced some minor additional modifications with a view to further enhancing the readability of the text. Thus, we have undertaken a handful of additional cuts to the text, largely in places where minor figures are mentioned who play no further role in the remainder of the correspondence. We have also omitted the abridged version’s various ellipses that indicated where the editors had intervened in the original German text, and we have generally spelled out any abbreviations that the letter writers used, whether out of habit or to preserve space on the precious paper. Further we have clarified the identities of the many people referenced in the letters by adding missing first or last names in brackets at first mention in any given letter (with the exception of members of the immediate family, such as their sons, whom Helmuth and Freya mention only by first name, of course).

  —HELMUTH CASPAR VON MOLTKE,

  DOROTHEA VON MOLTKE, and JOHANNES VON MOLTKE

  Norwich, Vermont, August 2018

  NOTES

  1. See Biographical Note.

  2. Ian Kershaw, The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–1945 (New York: Penguin, 2011), 52.

  3. See Appendix: Additional Documents.

  4. Freya to Helmuth James, October 20, 1944.

  5. Helmuth James to Freya, December 28, 1944.

  6. Freya to Helmuth James, December 15, 1944.

  7. Helmuth James von Moltke, Letters to Freya, 1939–1945, edited and translated by Beate Ruhm von Oppen (New York: Knopf, 1990), 397.

  8. See Ger van Roon, Neuordnung im Widerstand: Der Kreisauer Kreis innerhalb der deutschen Widerstandsbewegung (Munich: Oldenbourg R. Verlag GmbH, 1967), and Anna-Raphaela Schmitz, “Der Kreisauer Kreis und die nationalsozialistischen Gewaltverbrechen,” master’s thesis (Touro College, 2013).

  9. “Memorandum bei Carlo Mierendorff, June 14, 1943,” in van Roon, Neuordnung im Widerstand, 589.

  10. Helmuth to Freya, October 21, 1941, in Moltke, Letters to Freya, 175.

  11. Dorothee von Meding, Courageous Hearts: Women and the Anti-Hitler Plot of 1944, translated by Michael Balfour and Volker R. Berghahn (New York: Berghahn Books, 1997), 80.

  12. Freya to Helmuth James, October 12, 1944.

  13. Helmuth James to Freya, October 30–31, 1944.

  14. See Kershaw, The End, 51.

  15. Moltke, Letters to Freya.

  16. Ger van Roon, German Resistance to Hitler: Count von Moltke and the Kreisau Circle, translated by Peter Ludlow (London: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971).

  17. See Alfred Delp, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 4: Im Gefängnis (Frankfurt am Main: Joseph Knecht, 1984), 256.

  18. Peter Hoffmann, “Moltke, Goerdeler und Stauffenberg: Fragen und Kontroversen,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 56 (2012): 473–503.

  19. George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), 121.

  20. Helmuth James to Freya, January 10, 1945.

  21. Hoffmann, “Moltke, Goerdeler und Stauffenberg,” 476.

  22. Helmuth James to Freya, January 10–11, 1945.

  23. Helmuth James to Freya, January 21–22, 1945.

  24. Freya to Helmuth James, November 17, 1944.

  25. December 28, 1944, in Moltke, Letters to Freya, 396–97.

  26. Harald Poelchau, Their Final Hours: Recollections of a Prison Chaplain (Monterey: Monterey Institute of International Studies, 1989).

  27. Freya to Helmuth James, September 29, 1944.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE INTRODUCTIONS to the two German editions were coauthored by Ulrike von Moltke, whose influence remains in the present introduction as well. We want to take this opportunity to thank her for her sensitive and detailed work on these letters since Freya’s death in 2010. With her eye for detail and her ear for nuance, she was an indispensable co-editor of the full German text of the letters and of the abridged version that serves as the basis for this translation. We have relied on her deep familiarity with the text for questions arising in the process of assembling the present edition as well. In more ways than we can reconstruct, the latter bears the marks of Ulrike’s work even though she passed the baton to two of her children to join Helmuth Caspar von Moltke in the preparation of the English version. Konrad von Moltke, the second of the “little sons” in these letters, and brother and father to the editors of the present volume, did not live to see them published, but he would have taken enormous pleasure in their translations both into Polish and now into English. This work was done also in his memory.

  This version would not exist without the patient and dedicated work of Shelley Frisch, who translated the letters from the German. We are extremely grateful to her for this work as well as for the collaborative and open-minded spirit in which she involved us in her process. As a result, we find that both Freya’s and Helmuth’s voices resonate in this translation into a language that was deeply familiar to both of them in their lifetimes.

 
Bringing the book to an English-language readership involved the support of publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. We want to thank Jill Kneerim for helping us navigate the publishing terrain, as well as Susan Barba and Edwin Frank at New York Review Books for taking on this project. Karla Eoff’s meticulous copyediting was a great help. We also wish to thank Keri von Moltke for steadfast support and advice. Back in Germany, we would like to thank the publisher of both the original and the abridged editions, C. H. Beck—and in particular Wolfgang Beck and Ulrich Nolte. Finally, we would like to extend our thanks to Agnieszka von Zanthier who was instrumental in bringing about a Polish edition of the letters during the time we were working on the present volume in a mutually reinforcing process from which we hope readers of both translations will now benefit.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  THIS EDITION draws on the abridged German volume of the letters. All passages from the Bible cite the King James Version, in accordance with the family’s wishes. I have made minor adjustments to the punctuation when it obscured the meaning of the translated texts. In consultation with the editors, I opted to retain Helmuth’s practice of referring to Caspar and Konrad as “the little sons” or “your little sons” (as opposed to “my” or “our” little sons) in many of the earlier letters, as it reflects his initial distance from them, even though this lack of specificity is more jarring in English than it is in German. “The friends,” in reference to Harald and Dorothee Poelchau, serves as one of the many code names for people close to them, so as to limit the danger those people might face if the letters were confiscated; here, too, the deliberately distanced “the” has not been replaced by the otherwise more idiomatic “our.” The footnotes throughout the volume have been reworked extensively to reflect the needs of an English-language readership and to update particulars. The book’s annotated index of names was similarly adapted to serve the new readership.

  As I worked through this correspondence, I found myself thinking back to Reiner Stach’s three-volume biography of Franz Kafka, which I translated from the German not long before embarking on this project. Kafka’s The Trial is, at its core, about an opaque, labyrinthine judicial system that requires Josef K. to try again and again—in vain—to make inroads with an array of bureaucrats to plead his case while facing topsy-turvy logic and unaccountable delays and hurdles at every turn. As I made my way through the correspondence of Helmuth James and Freya von Moltke, I was struck by how frequently this same illogic applied to their futile attempts to reframe the judicial charges against Helmuth, to lessen the harsh treatment he had to face on a daily basis, to reduce the ultimate verdict, and to delay its implementation. Had Helmuth and Freya been successful in postponing this fate by just a few months in the fateful year of 1945, he might well have survived. Helmuth James von Moltke died on January 23, 1945, which, a few short years later, would mark the date of my own birth.

  We readers—and this translator—know the outcome of this heart-rending correspondence from the start, yet we find ourselves hoping against hope for an ending other than the inevitable one.

  —SHELLEY FRISCH

  Princeton, September 2018

  LAST LETTERS

  Oh, my love, I will always, always see myself walking across the fields at your side. Where was my hand, where did it always want to go? How beautiful that was. But I don’t want just to look toward the past; I want to love you, my love, I want to be able to keep on loving you always, even if I have to remain alone.

  —FREYA VON MOLTKE

  October 8–9, 1944

  For Harald and Dorothee Poelchau

  FREYA TO HELMUTH JAMES, SEPTEMBER 29, 1944

  Berlin, 29 Sept 44

  My Jäm, my love, my husband,1 my dearest beloved, how wonderful that I’m able to write you a proper letter again.2 How fulfilling it was for us to see each other.3 How well everything is going, and how full of grace! It makes me so happy. My love, I think I know exactly what is going on inside you; even though I lag way behind you and will remain so, I still belong with you and that is how it will stay forever. I will have to go on living and that will be hard, but it will work out, because I will be able to go on loving you. I will love you in God and not disturb you on the paths you’ll take, and I will love God more and better than I have before. But please, when you die, it must be in the certainty that apart from God I belong only to you. These fifteen years,4 that was our life, my Jäm; what comes now will be a life for the little sons, for other people, for things—I don’t yet know what, but my life, our life, my beloved Jäm, that is now coming to an end here. You always told me that you would die young. You promised me seven more years, but why talk about quantity. Quality is what counts. How good it is that I have experienced every minute with you consciously as a gift, that I fought for every one of them. Now I have the same treasures in me that you have enjoyed. We are really quite rich and we have, I’m convinced, enjoyed the greatest happiness this world has to offer. How good it is that you chose me after all,5 how good that I wrested the little sons from you,6 how much beauty and delight I will have to contemplate when you are no longer alive! I’ll grow old and I’ll change, but you will always remain inside me until I may die and find you again, one way or another.—My love, how wonderful it was to really see you yesterday, for I saw right away what was going on inside of you, even before you discovered me, which happened quickly enough. You saw the same in me, and when we looked at each other, we knew everything. I keep reveling in it. It’s part of the treasure trove! I think there’s barely a chance that we’ll get to see each other again, but it goes without saying that I’m doing everything I can to make it happen, though all paths seem to be totally blocked. They appear to be quite afraid of your group. It is so incredibly wonderful and delightful that this path leads so close to you.7

  I’ve been speaking about myself the entire time now, and you still have such a hard road to go down, but since you’ve never liked living,8 you really shouldn’t find the prospect of your life coming to an end unpleasant. My love, you’ve always told me that the best way to die is the one you’re now facing. I hope that’s how it is, that you are not afraid, my love. I confidently believe that this is essentially the way it is, and that you’ll find a way past the hurdles. I know that you’re firmly in God’s hands. And we have such good people who went before us: Mami, Carl Bernd, Granny, Daddy.9 That’s sure to be a welcome thought for you as well. My love, I don’t have any notions about life after death. They’d be wrong anyway, but we had enough revealed to us and our feeling is strong and clear, so I believe, believe gratefully, and will go on seeing and believing more and more profoundly.

  Your life seems beautiful and complete to me. You’ll die for something worth dying for. It’s uninteresting in the extreme that you might have gone on to become a “great” man. But it was important that the bomb didn’t explode in front of your window back in January.10 If you have to die now, I believe your death will have meaning. My Jäm, do you feel, as I do, how wonderfully in accord we are? Do you often feel, as I do, that we belong together so boundlessly, so suitably? At the same time, I’m not a spiritual person, but more like a growing plant in this world. This is far more my element than yours, but you must make sure I don’t stay too plantlike, and I think you’ve already seen to that quite well!

  You needn’t worry about our lives—the little sons’ and mine. I’m not at all afraid. We’ll manage, with or without Kreisau, with or without money, with or without communism. The little sons will turn out just fine. I will tell Casparchen11 that you died of an illness; I’ll tell him more when he’s older. I’ll hang on to Kreisau12 or the Berghaus13 as long as I can, because it’s everyone’s home. But everything will turn out all right.

  I’ll probably go to Kreisau again tomorrow and when I return sometime next week, I’ll bring you a warm suit. You think I know why I grabbed this other one again without thinking? I don’t. On the way here I said to myself, “What a fool I am!” I’ll try to bring a blanket too.<
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  Well, my Jäm, now I’m going to Carl Dietrich [von Trotha]’s14 to sleep. Here at the Poelchaus’ home I’ve been able to write this letter in peace, gratitude, and tears—not bad tears, only good ones, my love. They’re simply part of who I am. I have often let them flow quite freely when I’m with you. You know how I do that!

  There’s nothing else I need to tell you for now. I’m just as grateful as you. I’ve often written as much, and maybe I’ll do it a few more times, and it will always stay that way. I am your P.15

  1. Freya refers here and elsewhere to Helmuth as “Jäm,” short for James, and as “mein Wirt,” meaning “my host,” a reference to Friedrich Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell, in which the husband and wife refer to each other respectively as “Ehewirt” and “Ehewirtin,” or “marriage host.” Helmuth, too, adopts this term to refer to himself as “Dein Ehewirt” (“your marriage host”), and occasionally refers to Freya as “meine Wirtin.”

  2. This was the first letter in nine months not subject to censorship by the Gestapo.

  3. Freya and Helmuth happened to catch sight of each other across the Tegel prison yard on the previous day, when Freya was there for the first time.

  4. Freya is referring to the fifteen years since they first met in Grundlsee; see Biographical Note.

  5. Helmuth initially hesitated about whom to marry from among the young women in Eugenie Schwarzwald’s circle.