From the Jewish Community Vienna (translated):

© Brigitte Starzinger Glüxam via IKG Vienna

Address unknown

Scenic reading with musical accompaniment based on Kathrine Kressmann Taylor's famous epistolary novel “Address unknown” from 1938. Kressmann analyzes the horrors of the Nazi era in a very pointed way, using the friendship between the Jewish Max and the German Martin.

Martin Schulse, a German, and Max Eisenstein, a Jewish American, ran a successful art gallery in the United States. In 1932, Schulse decided to return to Germany with his family. Eisenstein continued to run the joint gallery in San Francisco. The two men remained in contact and exchanged professional and personal information in their letters. At first, the friendship did not seem to suffer from the physical separation. But Schulse, who initially viewed the political developments in Germany critically, gradually developed into an avowed National Socialist.

Addressee unknown, first published in 1938, is a book of oppressive topicality. Structured as an exchange of letters between a German and an American Jew in the months surrounding Hitler's rise to power, this masterpiece describes the dramatic development of a friendship and the story of a bitter revenge. “I have never read a greater drama in fewer pages. This story is masterful, it is built with unsurpassable suspense, in irritating brevity, not a word too much, not one missing... Never has the corrosive poison of National Socialism been more vividly described,” summarizes Elke Heidenreich in her epilogue.

Kathrine Kressmann Taylor left out her female first name when she offered the book to publishers in 1939, under the heading “addressee unknown”, in order to increase her chances of publication.

“I have never read a greater drama in fewer pages. Masterful.”

Elke Heidenreich