On the evening of october 28 in 1935, Carl Theil sat down  and wrote a Letter to Martin Buber, promised corrections to his translation of the Psalms. A few days earlier  a suitcase, then, at the beginning of November 1935, Wolfgang Ritzel, a student, old friend's son, moved into Carl Theil's house, situated in the Beethovenstrasse in North of Jena. The young Wolfgang Ritzel was  returning  from Breslau, where he had met friends and his old professor, Moritz Löwi - to start studying philosophy in Jena, since  with Hebrew, necessary for some theological goals, it hadn't worked that way.

 

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Some weeks before, in Zehdenick, thirty kilometers north of Berlin, a church conference opened an investigation into the accusations about a priest, a the man who  had come back  from Africa: expelled from the Berlin mission: Pastor Hugo Schmidt, whose unorthodox ideas about African Tribal religion and Christianization were not, not at all, compatible with the National Socialist reinterpretation. 

 

In november 1935,the young student in the house of Theil meets Pastor Schmidt's sister in the streets of Jena.

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Was there any reason to present...to introduce a publicly condemmed figure into the home of a dissmissed teacher..

come to their mind?

 

An eloquent silence  - as it looks like - must have developped between Carl Theil and Wolfgang Ritzel, a mute speech about the events of the Nuremberg Party Congress in september 1935, in which Wolfgang had taken part, and about the interpretation of the Laws to protect blood and soil - talks about Hermann Cohen, too and his interpretation of the Kantian religion of reason. Carl Theil, who had performed at the Odenwald School of Paul Geheeb, then In the early 1920s in Dresden, on the Hellerau, the Neue Deutsche school, took advantage of his enforced retirement and unemployment/unemployment to compositions, to building projects and above all to an intensive one Studying Martin Buber's translation of the Bible, for which he made many corrections made - an occupation that he reported to Wolfgang Ritzel...something the latter never spoke about to anybody.