Address Unknown

by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor

Get yourself at once a nice fat little wife who will busy herself with all your cares and feed you into a good humor.

We are vain and we are dishonest because it is necessary to triumph over other vain and dishonest persons.

But there is another realm where we can always find something true, the fireside of a friend, where we shed our little conceits and find warmth and understanding, where small selfishnesses are impossible and where wine and books and talk give a different meaning to existence. There we have made something that no falseness can touch. We are at home.

Who is this Adolf Hitler who seems rising toward power in Germany? I do not like what I read of him.

The man is like an electric shock, strong as only a great orator and a zealot can be. But I ask myself, is he quite sane?

A leader is found! Yet cautiously to myself I ask, a leader to where? Despair overthrown often turns us in mad directions.

We too must move. We must go with it. Even now there are being wrongs done.

History writes a clean new page.

There is the way to keep a wife contented, Max. Keep her so busy with babies she has no time to fret.

It is impossible for me to be in correspondence with a Jew even if it were not that I have an official position to maintain.

The Jewish race is a sore spot to any nation that harbors it. I have never hated the individual Jew – yourself I have always cherished as a friend, but you will know that I speak in all honesty when I say I have loved you, not because of your race but in spite of it.

You lament but you are never brave enough to fight back. That is why there are pogroms.

The man I have loved as a brother, whose heart has ever been brimming with sympathy and friendship, cannot possibly partake of even a passive partnership in the butchery of innocent people.

So, I am an American liberal? No! I am a German patriot.

I am a man because I act. Before that I am just a voice. I do not question the ends of our action. It is not necessary. I know it is good because it is so vital. Men are not drawn into bad things with so much joy and eagerness.

I did not expect you would take up arms for my people because they are my people, but because you were a man who loved justice.

I leave her in your hands, for I am helpless.

How can such a thing happen? I wondered. What changed their hearts so? What steps brought them to such cruelty?