Twelve letters written to Elisabeth de Waal (née Ephrussi) by the Austrian-born political scientist Eric Voegelin were recently added to his collection. These letters (along with some writings by Voegelin) had been in the possession of Elisabeth de Waal’s grandson Edmund de Waal, acclaimed author of The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss (2010), a beautiful and compelling book about his family.
Voegelin and Elisabeth Ephrussi met while students in Vienna in the 1920s and remained close friends throughout their lives abroad, he in the United States (he fled Vienna after Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938) and she in England, where she had settled with her Dutch husband, Hendrik de Waal.
Their correspondence (in German and English) addresses the fateful events of 1938. Particularly poignant in this regard is her letter of November 8, 1938, in which she informs Eric of the death of her mother (about which more is learned in The Hare with Amber Eyes). But beyond the politics of the day that affected them both so much is a rich dialogue over five decades on philosophy, history, religion, and law between two brilliant individuals.
The original installment of this correspondence at Hoover (acquired from Voegelin’s widow in the 1980s) consisted of forty-five letters from Elisabeth to Eric (from 1938 to 1976) and seven carbon copies of his letters to her (from 1941 to 1974).
Now, thanks to the generosity of Edmund de Waal, these twelve letters—ten of which had never been seen before, two of which Hoover had as carbon copies—from Eric to Elisabeth, spanning the years 1926 to 1959, complement the letters we had in hand. Indeed, Voegelin was in the habit of writing the date of his reply letters on those he received; we now have some of those reply letters.
Voegelin scholars (and readers of The Hare with Amber Eyes) will be delighted to have this dialogue re-created by having both voices, so to speak, reunited in the Hoover Archives.
