A shout out to Canan Yetmen for her upcoming third volume of the Anna Klein trilogy, All That Remains (Summer 2021). This enthralling climax to the series has all the trappings of a great summer read: complex WWII history, requited love, and the chance to live through the eyes of a passionate woman as she grows into the person the reader can applaud.
When I read her acknowledgements, I realized we had yet another connection, Ludwig Meidner, the expressionist artist who fled to England in 1939 escaping Jewish and artistic persecution. She loosely based one of her characters on him. I remember him vaguely as a generous man from when he drew my portrait (age 8) during his visit to our home in 1964. He made me feel like a princess even if the expressionist outcome shows a sad self.
Hanna Bekker knew him and his artist wife, Else, as early as 1925 in Kassel where her husband, Paul Bekker, was the Kassel theatre director. Ludwig designed the costumes and sets for Paul Bekker’s production of Calderon’s “Das Leben in Traum.” They corresponded frequently on painterly subjects and when he returned from England in 1953 she helped find him a workshop in Hofheim-Marxheim.”