Soldier’s Daughter: Karen Blixen on Nazism—“Breve fra et Land i Krig”

Abstract

Jeg folte da Befrielse ved at se de unge Mond marchere mod Fronten. For en Kamp er et Follesskab og to Duellanter bliver en Enhed. Karen Blixen, Farah (Skyggerpaa Grosset 16) felt a relief then, as watched the young soldiers marching west, to the frontier, for in aright the adversaries become one, and the two duelists make up a Unity. Isak Dinesen, Farah (Shadows on the Grass 5) TOWARD THE END of her life in 1958 Karen Blixen rekindled an old friendship from Africa, namely with General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck of Bremen. To the eighty-seven year old German officer, she wrote proudly (and in English) of her paternal lineage of soldiers who had fought on Danish soil: Both my father and my grandfather were officers in the French army as well as in the Danish, and received the Legion d'Honneur. My grandfather in the German-Danish of 1848-50 commanded the Barterie Dinesen. And she added eagerly, I wonder if any of your family took part in it (5 June 1958). (1) The occasion of this letter was Blixen's planned visit to Germany in 1958. Karen Blixen's acquaintance with Patti von Lettow-Vorbeck (1870-1964) began in 1913 when he traveled to Africa to serve as commanding general in German East African in 1914-1918. Blixen made his acquaintance on the ship on the way to Africa in 1913 and bid him farewell in Mombasa on the day of her wedding, January 14, 1914. The two did not meet again in Africa. During World II, von Lettow served Hitler's Germany and suffered the loss of two teenage sons at the eastern front. (2) When General von Lettow wrote to Blixen in the summer of 1939, he had not been in contact with her for twenty-five years. He had read Out of Africa and kindly pointed out that Blixen had misquoted a poem by Goethe. (3) This correspondence led to Blixen's visit to Bremen in March 1940 on her way to Berlin, an experience she describes in chronicles from Germany, published after the war as fra et Land i Krig (1948; translated as Letters from a Land at War 1979). Blixen maintained the renewed acquaintance with von Lettow during the Second World War. During the winter of 1942, Patti von Lettow stoically related to her the death of his nineteen-year old son at Moscow with the remark, But, of course, one has to bear it And he added in a heartening tone, I am convinced that the Bolshevisme will be bannished sooner or later, and think that this is the main question. (Karen Blixen i Danmark: Breve 1931-1962 I: 340). No response by Blixen to this particular letter is to be found in the archives. One wonders whether Blixen appreciated fully the gravity of the general's political convictions in 194-2. What Karen Blixen appears to have seen in the old officer was not a political foe, but an honorable and chivalrous old soldier with whom she identified the military heritage of her father and forefathers. The fact that Hitler's Germany had violated the non-aggression treaty and occupied Denmark in the spring of 1940, and the fact that Blixen's and von Lettow's forefathers obviously fought on opposite sides of the border in the Dano-Prussian Wars, seem not to have concerned the Baroness when she penned her letter to him in 1958. If she regarded him as a former political foe, then in her eyes he was a worthy adversary of the sort she idealized in her fiction. On occasion Karen Blixen liked to refer to herself as a soldier's daughter and, in keeping with this role, she cultivated notions of a warrior ethos, an aristocratic fearlessness, and a love of danger in her fiction. In Africa, she found the most magnificent and genuine embodiment of her ideals in the Masai warriors, the indigenous lion-hunters of Kenya, and she immortalized representations of them in her literary masterpiece Den afrikanske Farm (1937; Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa, 1937). Blixen's pastoral novel about Africa is colored dramatically by her appropriation of nineteenth-century European culture and values, including archaic notions of honorable warfare and chivalrous soldiery. …