Dear Georgette,

Of course, when I awoke this morning, Anschluss was on my mind. How could
it not be? You must understand that I am an impressionable person. As a child,
I was so frightened by listening to Grimm's Maerchen read aloud in kindergarten,
that I feigned headaches and asked to be excused to take a walk among the
flowers in the garden. I don't go to the movies or watch television.
I sit at home, bent over my computer keyboard and spin my own story.

I asked to read your typescript because I wanted to know more about you; and
I wanted to know more about you because of Margrit's relationship to you
and to your father. The effect that reading Anschluss has had on me is that I
feel I know you better perhaps almost than you know yourself. Of course that
feeling is an illusion, a reflection not of you but of my own susceptibility
to literature.

Over the past two months I have had messages from many, whose lives
have been affected by my sister; but none who are able to write.
After reading Anschluss the words of Goethes Tasso echoed in my mind:
Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qual verstummt, gab mir ein Gott zu sagen,
was ich leide. Whether you like it or not, as with the authors of the
other books that are real to me, Anschluss in its humane, holy and
undesecrated meaning, is what has happened to us.

Jochen