A Mother Reveals Herself To A Daughter Through A Legacy Of Letters

By Nancy K. Crevier

The letter that Lynn Willie holds in her hands has edges slightly yellowed. The 40-year-old words are stamped into the squares of lightweight pink paper with only a few erratic jumps of the individual letters, as was wont to happen in the precomputer era of manual typewriters. It is one of several letters that offered her a peek into her late mother’s world this summer when she traveled to Germany to meet her mother’s longtime German pen-pal, who has kept all of the letters Alice Preble sent to him over the years.

Alice Reimann Preble met Klaus through friends in Ostermundigen, Switzerland, where she summered as a young girl with her aunt. She was just 12 the summer of 1947, and Klaus Höfel was 16 years old. Whether or not Lynn’s mother developed a bit of a crush on the young German boy is a mystery that Ms Willie may never truly know, she said, but she does know that the two maintained a correspondence that would see them through their teenage years, marriages, and all of the ups and downs of life for the next 33 years.

The aunt moved to the United States in 1948, so it was many years before the pen pals saw each other again. By the time that he visited, Alice Reimann, now Alice Preble and the mother of three children, he was an ambassador for West Germany, traveling all over the world, and stationed in California. Ms Willie was only 3 years old at the time.

“They didn’t see each other again until 1964 when Klaus and his wife, Siegrid, visited my mom and dad in Brewster, New York,” recalled Lynn Willie recently.

 “I don’t really remember that visit, either, because I stayed at my grandmother’s. I was only 6 years old, but I remember that Siegrid did not speak English and that they stayed with us for one or two nights,” said Ms Willie. She assumes that it was a happy reunion for everyone, as her mother and Mr Höfel continued to write to each other several times a year, sharing the everyday news as years passed and families grew.

The visit in 1964 was the only time that the Prebles and Höfels met, most likely because life was very busy for the ambassador and his family, and because air travel across the country was not done with the ease that it is today, said Ms Willie.

Despite the years and miles that separated them, her mother and Mr Höfel seemed to share a special bond, from what little her mother shared with her when Ms Willie was growing up. “What I do remember,” Ms Willie said, “is that my mom would get really excited whenever a letter would come from Klaus, and how happy she would be for him when she would read about things going on in his life.”

When her mother became ill with cancer in 1978, Ms Willie took over writing to the Höfels, and reading Mr Höfel’s letters to her mother. Her mother’s pen pal served as an anchor for her as her mother’s health declined. “It was like having an uncle or a big brother that I could write to and tell everything to, and he was impartial. My mother and father were separated at this time and my older sister had left home, so it was just my younger brother and me, and it was nice to have someone else,” she recalled.

After the death of her mother in 1980, she kept in touch with her mother’s friend. It was an easy thing to do, and the transition appeared to be as seamless for Mr Höfel as it was for her, said Ms Willie. “At first, he would just send me postcards from wherever they were stationed,” she said, but as the years progressed, the postcards turned to longer missives and became more personal in nature, and served as a strand that kept alive the memory of her mother.

“When reading your letters I am always vividly reminded of your mother, who not only had about the same handwriting, but almost the same letter-style,” Mr Höfel wrote to her in 1986.

His travels around the world, relayed in his letters, were a source of information to Ms Willie, she said. “Wherever he was in the world, he shared it with me. Being so busy as a mom since 1983 and working as a nurse in Danbury, I felt kind of sheltered living here in Newtown, with no real exposure to the world,” said Ms Willie. “But through his letters, I felt like I learned a lot. He was stationed in Baghdad, for example, in the 1980s and he was actually living the war between Iraq and Iran, and that was very unreal to me. He would write about living in India, and Africa, and South America. It was always so interesting,” she said.

In 2007, Ms Willie decided it was time to hold a reunion. She made plans with a friend from work to visit Mr Höfel, who is now living in Nörvenich, Germany. “I felt like I had waited 50 years to meet him, and he had known me through my mother’s letters since I was born. It was just time to go,” she said.

The letters that Mr Höfel had penned to Alice Preble were lost somewhere along the way, or perhaps her mother destroyed them, said Ms Willie. But Klaus Höfel had kept all of her mother’s letters, and shared them with Ms Willie when she arrived in Germany. The letters, snippets of daily life and longings, filled in gaps and gave her a glimpse of her mother that she had never known. In photographs that her mother had mailed to her pen pal, Ms Willie saw her mother grow from a coltish teenager in full skirted dresses and bobby sox, to a self-assured young woman confident enough to share photos of a day at the beach with her pen pal, to a young wife and proud mother.

“We don’t often think of our parents as being so young and full of the same feelings and hopes that we felt as teenagers. I found out more about my mother’s personality from reading Klaus’ letters than I ever did from her,” said Ms Willie. “I also discovered some surprising things in reading her letters. In this letter,” she said, holding out the faded pink pages, “she talks about this really serious car accident that her parents were in. As I read it, I began to remember more about when that happened. But she also talks about how my dad had not spoken to my mom’s parents — they were not happy with my dad — for two years, and I never knew that. My mom was very close to her parents, so that must have been hard on her, but she never let on, that I recall,” said Ms Willie.

Many of the letters reveal her mother’s travails with raising her children, “But I don’t get as much mention,” laughed Ms Willie. “I guess I was a really good girl.”

“I think that Klaus truly appreciated Alice as a true friend,” said Ms Willie. “He thought of himself, I think, as a big brother and he was an outlet for her.” The ease of their relationship is apparent in the letters her mother wrote, she said, and there was never an indication of any jealousy on the parts of the respective spouses. “They seemed to genuinely be happy for each other when good things happened, and supportive when times were rough,” she said.

The meeting in September was not at all awkward, although she feared that Mr Höfel would not recognize her. “But when he saw us at the airport, he jumped right up from where he was sitting. It was like meeting an old friend,” said Ms Willie. “He knew all about me and told me how proud my mother was of me. It was more like a family reunion,” she said.

Mr Höfel’s daughter, Karin, Ms Willie’s friend, Cathy Snopkowski, Ms Willie and Mr Höfel traveled around southern Germany, following an itinerary put together by Mr Höfel. “We went everywhere, from Heidelberg to Lake Constance on the Swiss border, and through the Black Forest. It was amazing. He was so eager to show me the country,” she said.

Ever the ambassador, he insisted on paying for everything as he showcased his native country to his pen pal’s daughter. “We had such a good time, and it was so amazing in a lot of different ways,” said Ms Willie.

She also spent a good deal of time poring over the letters from her mother that Mr Höfel had preserved, marveling at the memories they triggered, and at the nuances of her mother’s life that had eluded her. While the letters Mr Höfel had written to her the past 20-some years had served as an open book into his life, seeing her mother’s words and holding the papers that Alice Preble had carefully folded and inserted into so many airmail envelopes for four decades put together the whole story for her.

It is a story she will continue through her “snail mail” correspondence with the elderly German gentleman. And she now has her own pen pal — Klaus Höfel’s daughter, with whom she regularly corresponds via e-mail.

Ms Willie carefully refolds the letter, tucks the aged photographs into an envelope, and closes the flap, satisfied now that she has returned to America with a better sense of who her mother had been. “I feel closer to Klaus now,” she says, “and to my mom.”