The Truth About Lou. Angela Von der Lippe

      Prelude

       This book was inspired by a gift and a promise. The gift was a book my grandmother gave to me shortly before her death in the eighties some twenty years ago. It was a book of German verse by the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke that she had carried with her as a young woman fleeing her native Poland before the German invasion of September 1, 1939. The promise was one I made to her just before she died.

       My grandmother was part of an imperiled band of ethnic Germans who inhabited a no-man’s-land, German Pomerania with its cities of Zoppot and Danzig, that had ceded to Poland after World War One. Years later the ethnic German enclaves left there were suspected by the Nazi invaders of being traitors and by their own fellow Poles of being potential spies. With no other option, my grandmother made her escape to the New World, turning her sights to assimilating into a new culture with a new language, and she proceeded to hand down to my mother that same forward-looking view of life, with never the slightest inclination to entertain any nostalgia for the old country.

       So it was a surprise indeed when shortly before she died, she entrusted a memento of her long-buried past to me, her granddaughter, partly because, she said, I could afford to look back, had in fact made a profession out of looking back as a scholar; and besides, she conceded, as the “writer in the family,” I was the one most likely to appreciate this book and all it meant.

      The book, I knew, was simply priceless, a first edition of Rilke’s poetry collection, The Book of Hours (Das Stundenbuch, 1903), bearing the author’s intimate inscription:

      To Lou—In whose presence these words were formed and in whose hands they now live.—Your old Rainer

       As my Oma lay sick, her strength waning in those last weeks, she seemed more willing than ever to speak of her childhood friends and family in Poland, to remember them all. It was almost as if she were taking one last count. So I’ll never forget how, in pressing this little volume into my hands, she mused that, though she and of course the world had come to know the poet’s verse, it had been the woman—this “Lou”—who had somehow eluded her.

       “Well, you know, Oma, if this is the same Lou, I think it may be, it was Rilke’s muse, the famous Lou Salomé.” (I’d picked up that much in graduate school.) But how, I asked, had she come upon this small treasure? She smiled and lit up remembering, saying: “My mama, your great grandmother, Johanna Niemann, wanted me to have it, but she died too soon of influenza in 1918, and so it was Katya, my nurse, the face I will never forget from my childhood, who gave it to me just before I fled. Mama’s close friend ‘Lou’ from Berlin had sent it to her with specific instructions that she was to give it to me when she saw fit. My Katya, too old to accompany me, did that for ‘Mütti’ at the last minute, when I was leaving . . .

       “There was a note, I seem to remember, from this Lou to Mama with the salutation ‘Dearest Johanna.’ . . . Isn’t it there anymore? Oh, I thought for sure I’d kept it. Perhaps with so much time elapsed and all the travels, it too has been lost, like so much else.” And then, patting the volume in my clasp and gently letting go, she looked up wistfully. “I always thought I should somehow know her (what with Katya pressing this book, Mama’s gift, her gift, into my hand at the very end), that I’d missed her, this Lou, in some way, but I don’t remember ever meeting her. I have no image of her. Not even a voice.

       “So now the gift is yours, Julianna”—my name on her lips sounding so strangely old, the one I was born with but could never pronounce as a girl. “Yours, my dear Anja”—she whispered my nickname with a slight German inflection—“yours to make with what you will. Perhaps you can find out more about who she was. You can do that easily nowadays, can’t you? I don’t know why, I guess it may be loose ends, but I just think it would be good to know.”

       I didn’t quite follow her or understand her need. And not long after that, death, her death, intervened, and then life, my life, intervened to send me to countless