ABSTRACT
On the 24th of May, 1933 I arrived in Paris after a panic stricken journey from Berlin. I could not relax for one moment until we reached the frontier at Aachen, where I knew I was safe from a sudden tap on the shoulder from a Nazi official possessed of a whim to arrest me. After ten hours of a train journey with my heart in my mouth, there was only a half conscious body left; my mind had gone into a state of anaesthesia. I found my way, nevertheless, into a small hotel on the Place du Pantheon, a stone's throw from where Helen lived Helen a friend of many years and wife of Franz, a writer. Franz had been instrumental in publishing my poems and my translations of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal about nine years earlier in the Revue Vers und Prosa. He held an influential position at the Rowohlt Verlag and had been one of my supporters and friends. Helen had made her home in Paris in the 'twenties as fashion correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung.
