Addressee unknown

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Address Unknown (Engl. Address Unknown ) by Kathrine Taylor one's epistolary novel from 1938. The work is about the end of a friendship between two German-American business at the beginning of Nazi rule .

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The Jewish businessman Max Eisenstein and his partner Martin Schulse, Aryan, according to the Nazis, run an extremely prosperous art gallery in San Francisco, California.

In 1932 Schulse moved from San Francisco to Munich.

Initially looking at the development of the transfer of power to the National Socialists , Schulse himself became more and more an avowed National Socialist . Schulse is offered a high position in local government because of his wealth and connections. His social status increases day by day. The initial opportunism turns into glowing fanaticism, which eventually leads to Schulse distancing himself from his Jewish friend and business partner.

His former business partner Max Eisenstein, who stayed in the United States and continues to run the joint art gallery in San Francisco, accepts the change in character of his former friend with a heavy heart.

However, when Eisenstein's sister Griselle, an actress, is endangered in Germany for the sake of her Jewishness, Eisenstein begs Schulse to help the sister who was once in a relationship with Schulse. Eisenstein reports that a letter to Griselle with the note "addressee unknown" was returned to him.

In fact, Griselle, pursued by the SA , fled to Schulse. He refuses to help the former lover. Griselle is then slain by SA men on Schulse's property. Schulse gave Eisenstein a sober report on this incident and further called on Eisenstein to refrain from further correspondence, since connections with Judaism would now be detrimental to his career. In addition, the letters were opened by the secret service and Schulse was repeatedly summoned to the office to answer for this correspondence.

From now on, however, one letter follows the other every two weeks, addressed to Schulse. In these letters, Eisenstein returns to the old kindness, but writes the short letters in a very catchy style, which must arouse the suspicion among the secret service officers who control the post that Schulse is an agent of a Jewish resistance organization.

Schulse now begs Eisenstein to stop this correspondence because his life is in serious danger. Schulse vividly describes the horrors of the concentration camps and the consequences of its physical destruction. He describes his increasing social isolation and dismantling, which he had to endure since Eisenstein's letters after Griselle's death. Now he invokes the old friendship. Eisenstein, however, continues to write, knowing full well what destructive effect these letters must have on Martin Schulse. In fact, the last letter, which was sent in the spring of 1934, comes back with the note: addressee unknown .

Although Schulse's fate remains open, the author implies the physical annihilation of Martin Schulse with the composition of her epistolary novel. Although Eisenstein could not punish the death of his sister directly against the murderers, a willing protagonist of the system became the target of Eisenstein's revenge on behalf of them. By pretending to be false, Eisenstein succeeded in making Schulse, the willing advocate of the National Socialist worldview, a victim of this system and thus his own conviction.

The novel, published in the American magazine Story in 1938, the year of the Reichspogromnacht , shows that the USA was informed of the National Socialist attitude towards the Jews and was also aware of riots.

Publications

The letter novel first appeared in 1938 in the September / October issue of New York magazine Story . The American publisher Simon & Schuster published the story as a book in 1939.

The book was filmed in 1944 by William Cameron Menzies based on a script by Herbert Dalmas. The 1944 Oscar winner Paul Lukas played Martin Schulz; the other actors included Peter van Eyck , Mady Christians and Frank Faylen .

The material was staged repeatedly on the stage. BBC Radio 4 made a radio play in 2008 .

Book editions

  • Address unknown . Cincinnati, Ohio: Story Press Endangered Classic, 1995.

Web links