Helmuth Caspar von Moltkes Rede anlässlich der Beisetzung Freya von Moltkes
am 8. Januar 2010

When my mother was 18 years old and had just graduated from High School she persuaded her mother to allow her to join her older brothers at a 1929 summer retreat in Austria organized by the eminent educator Eugenie Schwarzwald.  She was so young that her own mother went along as chaperone – quite willing to give her daughter space, but wishing to observe proprieties.  She met and fell passionately in love with my father, then aged 22 and they married 2 years later. My theme here is passion.  She believed passionately in allowing the heart free reign. She believed passionately in democracy and the inalienable dignity of every human being.  Above all, she believed passionately in the rhythms of life which give you guidance about yourself.  Thus she knew that Helmuth James was the right person for her and linked her life to his without any hesitation at a very young age.  This sense or rhythms of life also caused her to consciously disobey her husband’s express wishes, frequently articulated, in early 1937 and bring me into the world.  He did not want to expose children to the world of the 1930s, but was subsequently a loving and good father to both my brother Konrad and myself.  She wanted to follow the rhythm of her life and trust in the future to protect her family.  Her life ended in the same way one week ago when she embraced death with the same certainty with which she had embraced life earlier, with a sense that it was her time to explore this final mystery of human life.

Many may find this description of my energetic, practical, vibrant, down-to-earth, unselfconscious and unassuming mother surprising, but it was this sense of life felt through the heart which guided her intelligence and practicality.  Many are those who sought her advice or help over the years and benefited from it.  When she met Eugen Rosenstock Huessy in 1956 she met someone who was also a man of great passion, a man with an acute sense of time paired with an enormous intellect and knowledge and to me it is hardly surprising that they loved each other and she joined him after the death of his wife Margrit to stay in Norwich for the rest of her days.

In 1935, aged 24, she inherited the mantle of matriarch and center of the family from my grandmother Dorothy and she wore it proudly and well, for her own children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren but very much, too, for our large extended family of Moltke relatives who all had to find themselves again in a changed Germany following the lost war.

It was the fate of my parents to be born into an autocratic world in Germany about 100 years ago.  Their maturity coincided with the advent of one of the most hateful regimes that Europe has ever seen, which was anathema not only to themselves, but also to many of their friends.  Their joint effort to confront the horrors around them brought them an increasingly deep belief in Christianity as a staff to lean on, particularly evident in the writings of my father.  Following his death my mother always felt his presence, just as he had predicted, like a star going before her, and was never afraid.  Eugen Rosenstock, with his deep Christian roots similarly reinforced her own deep but very private belief in God’s guiding hand.

God’s guiding hand was on full display in 1988, when a conference to celebrate Eugen Rosenstock Huessy in Hanover, NH, produced a chain of events that saw her beloved former home in Silesia chosen as the site for the Reconciliation Mass between Poland and Germany, held on November 12^th, 1989, the same week as the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The subsequent restoration of the property and its dedication to the youth of a united Europe became the third major task from that date, joining her never ceasing efforts to ensure that the Kreisau Circle and the thoughts of Eugen Rosenstock Huessy were made available to posterity.

She saw many of the things dear to her heart recognized in the course of her life and felt that she had done her bit to give them recognition.  She left us last week, but as her note on the inside cover says: she is just upstairs!