“Provided that all the waiting is not going to ‘do us in’ before then.” Approach to a letter and its mystery

On July 12, 1934, the date of the present letter, the “Jewish Society for Arts and Science in Hamburg reg. soc.” Jüdische Gesellschaft für Kunst und Wissenschaft e.V.(abbreviated: Jüd. Ges. f. K. & W.), registered in Hamburg, had been in existence for six months. It offered Jewish artists and scientists who had lost their posts due to Nazi legislation new opportunities for performance and thus financial support. Leopold Sachse, the director of the Hamburg City Theater, today’s State Opera, who had been dismissed in 1933, was the artistic director of the society Jüdische Gesellschaft für Kunst und Wissenschaft. In his letter, he addressed Anny Gowa, the stage and costume designer married to Ferdinand Gowa. The literary scholar and lawyer Gowa, here jokingly referred to as “my dear employee,” was the society Jüdische Gesellschaft für Kunst und Wissenschaft’s managing director. Sachse informed Anny Gowa that her submitted costume designs had met with a very positive response and that they would be adopted for the planned production once a contract was signed. In the course of correspondence exchanged in 1992, Anny Gowa provided the author of this essay with a copy of the letter.