INTERNATIONALE FRAUENLIGA FÜR FRIEDEN UND FREIHEIT DEUTSCHER ZWEIG
BERLIN, den Dec 24th /25
My dear Miss Addams --
I hope these lines will find you in best health. I feel ashamed of not having written you all these months, but every time I had finished a letter to you, I thought it meant too much trouble for you to go through a letter of mine.
We were very busy all these months -- our foreign policy allowing a bit more of hope for a sensible method of setting international affairs, our house politics or be rather economic situation however being extremely critical & serious. We are having more than 1½ millions [page 2] of unemployed at present. ...
Dear Miss Addams, I am urged by our groups to ask whether it would not be possible for you to come to Germany this time, going to or coming from Ireland. We are having about 60 groups of ↑in↓ the German Section of the W.I.L. all tremendously eager to have the [honor] of your presence. I would do whatever is in my strength to organize a lecturing tour in a way that you ↑it↓ would not be a strain for you, that you would need not go to towns you do not want to, that you would have all the time you wish to see ↑the↓ personalities you want. It would be a great honor for us and a great help for our work. This part of my letter is a very official one & I am afraid my English is not good enough to express all the joy & gratefulness we would feel if you could fulfill our wish. It is the months of June, July & August when it [page 3] is nearly impossible to [organize] good meetings as people are out of town. But your visit in any other month will be ↑well↓ [organized] and meetings well attended. Our groups in Hamburg, Bremen, Berlin, Frankfurt [am Main], Breslau, Stuttgart, [Munich], Karlsruhe, Freiburg, in the Rhineland, Westphalia, Saxony & Thuringia would love to receive you & if you think my interpreting efficient enough I would feel it an honor to do interpreting & any other service I may do for you.
May I expect an answer favorable to our xmas wish? [page 4] I am expecting to rush down to France for some days in order to settle the tree-affair. You know the German Section is going to plant an alley of trees in one of the devastated parks where there are no trees yet planted. I am afraid we shall have to hasten the thing else we might fail another time ↑this time↓ hampered [through] a reactionary wave in France. News from there are rather troubling. ...
I am writing this in a little village in the Bavarian mountains at the foot of the Zugspitze, where I am spending the holidays & translating Dr Aletta Jacobs' Memoirs which I hope will find a publishing house in Germany, too. After New Year's Day I shall be back in Berlin again.
With all my very best wishes to you, Miss Addams, & the whole Hull-House for a happy New Year
I am yours ever gratefully and devotedly
Gertrud Baer.
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