„… to air out the cloak of anonymity.“

I was able to solve this little riddle, however, by looking at an envelope that turned up elsewhere of the bundle of papers but appeared to belong to this brief exchange. The sender – like the memorandum added later, “Fun correspondence (re marriage) between Hilde, aged 18, & Großmutter Stahl” – showed that these letters hadn’t originated from an anonymous gentleman but rather from the young Hilde Salomonis (1912–1991), who in March of 1931 had sent her grandmother a (rather premature) April Fool’s letter as a joke!

The daughter of well-to-do Berlin businessman Felix Salomonis and his wife Rosalie (née Stahl), Hilde came from a respectable family. On 17 February 1931, three and a half weeks before she wrote the first letter, she had finished her high school exams at the Bismarck Gymnasium in the prosperous Grunewald district of Berlin. In the remarks attached to her high school diploma it says that she wanted to “study political economy.” She gave up this intention, however, when she enrolled on 10 April at the University Berlin Law School, a course of study she later continued in Heidelberg, Freiburg and – after the National Socialists took power – in Switzerland, where she graduated in 1935.

In a first draft, Ernestine Stahl wrote a letter expressing enthusiasm for the offer of this unknown gentleman, who had assured her that he was simply “speaking from the heart.” She did not send this version, though. Perhaps she doubted the seriousness of his “hopefully sincerely-meant words.” Instead, on the same day, Stahl wrote a second letter in which she explained that she would not be needing the – surely “well-intentioned” – services of the letter-writer, because “my granddaughter possesses such a clear and mature character that she can certainly choose a worthy life partner for herself, without the intervention of a third party, even her grandmother.”

Hilde Salomonis had not expected this straightforward avowal from her grandmother. She wrote another letter on 15 March in which she registered her “great esteem.” Knowing well that her grandmother actually advocated traditional conservative ideas, Hilde wrote: “it is tremendously impressive to me, dear gracious lady, that you uphold your admirable, time-tested views without imposing them on the young people.” The fact that, as family matriarch (already many years a widow), she “did not” interfere “unsolicited in the lives of her children and grandchildren” prompted the 18-year-old finally to offer a compliment: “You are more modern than our modern youth, for you are tolerant!” Hilde concluded with a proposal to meet in person, in order to “air out the cloak of anonymity:” she would make an appearance as “the good, old family friend” and no longer as “the ‘matchmaker’!” Whether or not this encounter took place and how Ernestine Stahl reacted to her granddaughter’s practical joke are unfortunately not revealed to us by the documents.

Hilde Salomonis did eventually get married in 1938. She emigrated in the same year together with her husband, Kurt Gabriel, to New Zealand. An autobiographical interview she gave in 1986 offered a glimpse into the mindset of this emancipated woman. In her informative and remarkably witty statements, she spoke with astonishing openness about personal matters like falling in love and sexuality in her youth, marriage and child-bearing. Sadly she doesn’t mention the exchange of letters with her grandmother, but she does relate other anecdotes. She was firmly dedicated even as a child to the idea of studying and having a career: 

“When I told my family that I wanted to study law, it was as if I’d said that tomorrow it will rain. Nothing special.”

 No one had assumed that “I would be sitting at home as a housewife.” In their social circles no one had arranged marriages. The old saying “that a father says to his daughter: ‘Come here, my child, you are the lucky bride’” was “already a joke when I was a kid.” The transcript of the interview is among the papers in the family collection and can be seen – in addition to the letters – in our Reading Room in the W. Michael Blumenthal Academy (further information on the Reading Room on our website).