A Letter from Jena

On November 9, 2023, a letter from the German-Jewish writer Gustav Maier was discovered in the Jena City Archives. This letter had lain dormant there since 1897, i.e. for 126 years. Actually, almost all writings by people of Jewish descent in Germany had been destroyed. This particular letter, however, had been assigned to an archive of the Jena Masonic lodge "Friedrich zur ernsten Arbeit", and no one could have guessed that it contained historically important statements on anti-Semitism in Germany. In fact, Gustav Maier states that in Germany, Jewish origins were an odium that attracted hatred and contempt, and that is why he immigrated to the freer Switzerland. There he was also able to informally join the liberal Reformed Zwingli Church with his family. At the time, he could not have known that Gustav Maier had thereby saved part of his family from the Shoah, only anticipated it.