13 - “With you, i have my Anchorage”: Fifteen Letters from Etty Hillesum to Julius Spier
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2021
Summary
Abstract
In December 2012, a letter from Etty Hillesum to Julius Spier was recovered. Until that date, only a fragment of the letter was known from Hillesum having copied it into her diary. With this essay, the authors join the research that was ignited by the discovery of the complete letter. All of Hillesum's known missives to Spier are examined. In contrast to the diary, written in Hillesum's native Dutch, the letters are written in German. The authors take a close look at the contents and conclude that Etty Hillesum put quite a bit of effort into composing these texts and that she phrased her thoughts and feelings on a variety of subjects with an open, honest frame of mind.
Keywords: Julius Spier, correspondence, close reading, authorship attribution, Etty Hillesum
Etty Hillesum and Julius Spier communicated in various ways: they met in person, exchanged phone calls, and wrote letters. Hillesum copied several of these letters, or fragments thereof, in her diary notes, the first being a well-known text: it acts as the preface to her first notebook. This and many other letters, including the (fragments of) 71 in the section “Letters from Etty Hillesum,” have become part of Etty: De nagelaten geschriften van Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943 (1986) [E.T.: Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943 (2002)]. However, a few texts were not included in the complete edition of Hillesum's literary legacy. Together with some other documents, they had been stored in a binder and were forgotten by the time the complete edition of Hillesum's writings in Dutch was published in 1986. In December 2012, however, Jan Geurt Gaarlandt, the Dutch publisher of Hillesum's work, opened the binder and discovered the texts anew.
One of the findings in the tucked away folder was the copy of a letter Hillesum wrote to Spier on 17 March 1942. Since the text, on a sheet of thin paper, is typed, it cannot be recognized through Hillesum's characteristic handwriting. Also, it lacks an addressee and signature. Yet, set in the German language, with a date and several sentences identical to sentences in Hillesum's fifth notebook, there is enough evidence to prove that she was the author.
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- Information
- Reading Etty Hillesum in ContextWritings, Life, and Influences of a Visionary Author, pp. 285 - 302Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018