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Whoever wants to understand exile has to read letters.
All the humiliations, impositions and tests that a life experienced because it was no longer worth anything in National Socialist Germany or was even directly endangered - in personal correspondence they become concrete and individually understandable.
Letters were the straw of life for many exiles.
The world had never seen any smartphones that flushed news and social media feeds of loved ones non-stop into the timeline.
On the contrary: communication was so rare and precious that it was treated with pathos: "A day when I have news from you, a day when a dear letter comes from you, is a feast day, a holiday for me."
This is what Kurt Landauer (1884 to 1961) wrote from exile in Geneva to his lover Maria in Munich.
"It really is the case that ... I live with these letters of yours and live in them," said Landauer, whose life report and letters Jutta Fleckenstein, Rachel Salamander and Lara Theobalt have now provided in a carefully commented edition on behalf of the Jewish Museum Munich .
Kurt Landauer (left) in the stands, 1929/30
Source: private ownership / Insel Verlag
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Landauer was president of FC Bayern Munich from 1919 to 1933, and in 1932 the soccer club won the German championship for the first time.
Less than six weeks after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, Landauer had to resign from his post as a Jew;
he also lost his job as an ad marketer for "Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten".
The morning after the Reichspogromnacht in November 1938, like many Jews, he was arbitrarily arrested and interned in the Dachau concentration camp for 33 days.
Only then did he take care of leaving the country - and thanks to his childhood sweetheart Maria Klopfer and a guarantee, he was lucky to find refuge in Switzerland from 1939 to 1947, just like Maria Klopfer did.
She is the woman Landauer would have liked to have married in 1914 if his father had not been against the liaison.
He and Maria made love, but they didn't get together.
Instead, Maria married someone else with whom she emigrated to New York after 1945.
Landauer's love: Maria Baumann, 1926
Source: private ownership / Insel Verlag
From 1927 a new, a second Maria had entered Landauer's life.
Maria Baumann, the Landauer brothers' housekeeper.
Kurt Landauer had a (also sexual) relationship with her, the status of which remained undefined for a long time, especially after the Nazis came to power and Landauer feared, after the Nuremberg Race Laws were passed in 1935, that his "Aryan" housekeeper would be considered "racial disgrace" could be interpreted if she has a relationship with her Jewish householder.
The fear of being accused of "racial disgrace"
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Out of sheer caution, Maria was even dismissed, but at the end of 1935 she was employed again in the Landauer house after Kurt had assured himself with the police that the racial laws permitted this - one of the bizarre episodes of this life, rich in absurd moments. Landauer's relationship status with Maria remained “off” and did not go back to “on” until she left for exile. Why not, you can see Landauer's "life report", a 77-page marriage proposal, which Landauer stated several times and which he only sent to Maria Baumann in 1947.
How much self-confidence does a person lose when his job, finances and honorary positions are so neglected as Kurt Landauer was a Jew under the Nazis?
Football cartridges are generally thought of as powerful people who are in love with making.
The extensive and instructive commented edition with Landauer's testimonies documents the opposite.
It adds a new, private, almost despondent facet to the football official's life picture, which seemed to be somewhat illuminated with two biographies, a documentary and a feature film.
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The book shows once again the total uncertainty, bitterness and exhaustion of the exiles.
Even if they were saved from Nazi persecution and murder, they were worried about their existence: “Do you know what it means when you suddenly become homeless in your more mature years, when you have to lose your nationality and now suddenly you are stateless has become?
Do you know what it means to have to live on call - and revocation - in a foreign country, to have no way of earning even a penny?
Do you know what it means to have to live among strangers, year in and year out in the same modest room? "
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Only 25 letters between Landauer and Maria have survived.
They give touching insights into a love that has been consolidated over exile.
The fact that Landauer is even returning to brown Munich has to do with Maria, whom he married in 1955.
And with FC Bayern, whose president he was re-elected in 1947.
Jutta Fleckenstein, Rachel Salamander (eds.):
Kurt Landauer
.
The President of FC Bayern.
Life report and correspondence with Maria Baumann.
Insel, 378 p., 28 €.