„Ich hoffe, lächelnd zu sterben“

Ida Dehmel, the socially committed widow of the poet Richard Dehmel and founder of the GEDOK (German Association of Women Artists), had to give up any public function during the Nazi era. In the years leading up to the Holocaust, she lived in seclusion in the Dehmel House in Blankenese, ostracised for being Jewish. The 121 letters she wrote to her friends Marie and Bolko Stern from Schwalbach between 1933 and 1942, which have been collected and arranged in chronological order in this volume, are an essential personal testimony of the final phase of Ida Dehmel's life. They speak for themselves and are moving as they reveal her sometimes dramatic daily life and suffering during those threatening times.