Love Letter

“All of Halle is standing on its head,” wrote the twenty-two year-old nurse, referring to her hometown, where she wason vacation. “Wherever I go – to friends, to cafés, to social events – people are openly speaking about Jesus. The entire city is breathing a new spirit, and I yearn to be gripped by it as

well. In many places you hear that this or that person has completely changed – even atheists and scoffers! Professors, military officers, businessmen, and students are equally inspired by the power of the message. People are literally dancing in the streets for joy.” It was the spring of 1907, and Halle, a  bustling university town of 150,000 northwest of Leipzig, had come into boom  times. At the close of the previous century, chemical and metal industries attracted by its location on the Saale River had put

down roots, and now they were flourishing. Seven short years before the outbreak of a war that would

sweep this easy-going life away, it seemed that the good times would never end – at least for those in the city’s wealthier neighborhoods. Yet even now something momentous was happening that would shake the comfortable lives of many. For some, the change would be forever. Emmy von Hollander, the young letter-writer, was ensconced in Halle’s patrician circles, with a family tree extending back

centuries and replete with high-ranking civil servants and members of the Teutonic Order of Knights. And even if her father, a law professor, was stuck in an academic backwater that frustrated his ambitions, he clung to the lifestyle he felt his lineage demanded, maintaining a large town house and a troop of servants to care for his wife and their seven children. To Emmy, the second oldest, the wave of exuberance she

felt that spring in Halle was something new and unfamiliar. “God,” she wrote, “was almost never talked about in our family.  Certainly we went to church, but otherwise we found it embarrassing to speak about holy things.” It wasn’t that she  didn’t sense their power. As a child, she had lost a little brother,

The von Hollander children in Halle,1901: Olga, Else, Monika, Gretchen, Heinz, and Emmy and his death had made a deep impression on her. Later, as a teen, the confirmation classes she attended with her younger

sister Else led her to dedicate her life to God, and drew her to nursing – not only as a profession, but as a calling. “I first  worked with children in a hospital managed by Lutheran deaconesses.What moved me about the sisters I worked with was their devotion to God. Because of their influence, I gave away

all my things, including my jewelry, to my brother and sisters.”



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