Letters To My Beloved Ghost

About the Book

Early in the years 2004, George, the author of the “Letters to my Beloved Ghost”, received a letter from the daughter of Hedi, his deceased girl friend of over a half century ago, informing him that she had uncovered a large box in the attic of her aunt’s house in the Lower Franconia town of Ebern in Bavaria, In it, along with many mementoes of her mother’s youth, she ran into a stack of letters that he had written Hedi in the years 1945 to 1949, a group of his love letters that she decided to leave behind after accepting a position with a family living in the previous German Colony of South-West Africa, now Namibia, a job that entailed acting as house-keeper, with eventual matrimonial prospects involving the son of the house.

He, George, was still a medical student at that point in time, going through considerable hardships, mostly of a monetary nature; his dire impoverishment, prevented him from realizing his dearest wish, namely marry Hedi and raising a family with her as his partner. Sybil, the daughter, first sent him a calendar that he had presented to Hedi on the eve of her twenty-first birthday, where he had written down a selection of 22 of his early poems, written in the French language, collated especially for her After a lapse of 58 years which the calendar had spent in total darkness, he held it in his hands once more, a resurrected token of his lost youth, and of his dead love.

The letters he received from Hedi during the period in question did not exist any longer. In the early 1950s, in response to the wishes of his wife Wanda who did not understand why he wanted to keep them, and who he loved deeply and tenderly, he burnt those witnesses of the teenage sentimental journey he had once undertaken, along with the few small black and white photos of the girl that he had saved through the previous years.

He forgot the episode and in the end barely could remember, if at all, how Hedi had appeared to him when he knew her. Life with his family, which meanwhile had grown to five members, was filled with joys, work, success, sometimes with worries and disappointments.

Much later, as Wanda became the victim of the Alzheimer’s Disease, As an escape from the sorrows and despair that resulted from that developing tragedy, he sought and explored that seemingly forgotten chapter of his past. He did so using the Internet and succeeded in establishing contact with some people that lived in Ebern and showed sympathy toward his quest.

From them he learned of Hedi’s passing away in 1996, an unexpected and sudden realization that triggered off additional grief and sorrow: First there had been mother who died in 1988, then came Wanda’ illness, and finally Hedi who was not to be reached any more, losing the women he had felt closest to during his life one after the other.

He traveled to Ebern that fall and saw the town again; he met a number of survivors from the era he had lived there for a few short months. He decided tocall this journey a “Pilgrimage”, and he wrote a book that reflected his reactions to the experiences he encountered, his impressions, sorrows and the reawakened nostalgia that resulted.

That initial piece of work was first of a series of eight volumes he had published in the that followed three years, books mostly autobiographical in nature, that also contained some of his verses and more poetic prose, and a few of his unorthodox philosophical elaborations..

The “Letters to my beloved Ghost” is a sequence of contemporary comments on the background of the letters he received from Sybil. After a longer passage relating to the “Calendar”, as was mentioned earlier, he engaged in a review of the events of “then”, moving along the chronology of the epistolary documents. He sought and gained insights into what happened during those many years