“What is transpiring in the world now is madness, the self-flaying of Europe, really of the world,” intoned Hausegger to Straube after Christmas, exasperated and defiant. “What humanity has built for thousands of years is being destroyed in blind fury. To what end? Only the spirit itself will remain inaccessible to them. Victory ultimately will come from this.” This credo to German Geistigkeit afforded little immediate comfort as Germany burned. Hausegger's Munich had been targeted by air attacks throughout the war. The unprecedented destruction of its inner city would ensue only a few months later at the hands of the Americans and the British. Straube shared Hausegger's view that the Allies aimed not merely to cripple the German war machine but also to undermine the nation's morale. The cultural symbolism of a city like Leipzig inevitably informed that effort. Now, as the air campaigns ramped up, those like Straube who had always preached idealism were forced to retreat into it as the material world came crashing down. “But you are right,” Stein would write him from Berlin the following May. “Our enemies want to obliterate our cultural centers, to rob us of our possessions. [But] the works of our great masters remain indestructible and secure, and this eternal Germany is the focus of the enormous struggle that we must and will win.” Stein, too, wished to keep vigil for the “eternal Germany” of culture, if not of the so-called thousand-year Reich.

Hausegger's December 1943 letter would not reach his old friend in Leipzig. The Straube apartment had been burned out in the early morning of December 4, rendering its aged occupants among the homeless. Writing three days later in an unusually lean style reflecting the chaotic circumstances, Straube related to a former student that he and Hertha had passed the following night in the Conservatory's cellar, departing on the 5th for refuge in Tübingen. The train journey had required twenty-nine exhausting hours. “Living with Herr Ludwig Schmidt, Münzgasse 17 I. Return to Leipzig [will be] on January 13, 1944; new address Leipzig C1, Grassistraße 8, Staatliche Hochschule für Musik. Exact quarters still unclear.” But as the smoke lifted, more became clear. The old Johanniskirche, host to the Bach tomb, stood in ruins.