The actor Alexander Granach wrote more than 300 letters from exile to his great love, the actress Lotte Lieven. When they first met in 1920 and fell in love, she was training to be an actress in Munich, while Granach was the main character actor at the theatre Schauspielhaus München. After Granach emigrated in 1933, Lotte Lieven saw him again only twice: once during a visit to Moscow in 1936 and once while Granach was in Switzerland. She presumably did not follow Granach into exile at first, because she could not leave behind her mother, who was in need of care. Later on, the outbreak of World War II prevented their plans for a life together in the USA.

The letters talked about everyday problems and worries in exile. Granach gave reports about other emigrants who asked him for money as soon as he was given a role. And his efforts to learn English were often the subject of his correspondence. He also passed on to Lieven gossip from the Californian emigrant community, for example, about the wife of film director Erwin Piscator or the writer Heinrich Mann.

A motif that appears often in his letters is home and homeland. As the actor writes in the letter shown here, Lotte Lieven is the only person on earth who means home for him. Home is not something he defines geographically here, seeing it rather as a thing that derives from personal relationships. His letters begin with many variations of address surrounding this theme, such as “My beloved piece of home” or, in this case, “My beloved home”.