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Wallis Wilde-Menozzi 
In the century that has recently passed and in previous centuries, we often credit Switzerland as a place that offered respite and neutrality in many senses to people fleeing from wars and persecution. It offered solace to a destitute James Joyce who was seeking financial support and an institution for his schizophrenic daughter after he and Nora would no longer be alive. It gave space to a recovering T.S. Eliot to write the drafts of the Waste Land. It holds Rilke on a hill in one of its many quiet church yards. Marina Tsvetayeva lived in Switzerland before she returned to Russia and met her own suicide. Voltaire and Rousseau breathed its air and brought that clear coloring into their way of thinking. It offered Nabokov a princely suite in the Palace Hotel, when the exile finally chose a place to settle. The list extends into a book. Ledig-Rowohlt, a distinguished German publisher, like many intellectuals, established a residence in Switzerland, happy with its beauty and peace.
The telegram that is reproduced below is from James Baldwin to Ledig-Rowohlt. Baldwin, too, had a Swiss moment and wrote about his experience of being black in a small unnamed Swiss village. In the telegram he is wishing Ledig-Rowohlt a happy seventieth birthday. Baldwin was among the many American writers who had relationships with Ledig-Rowohlt that went beyond formal ties. In the few letters from Baldwin held by the Ledig-Rowohlt foundation, the writer´s personal affection and trust in the publisher are apparent.
Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt lived through the war in Germany and was the first publisher, helped by the Allies, to rise from the ashes of the defeated Reich. He introduced a version of paperbacks--the RO-RO´s-which could be sold cheaply to an impoverished population and rapidly bring the west--from Ernest Hemingway to Albert Camus--into a Germany that had to move forward. Upon Ledig-Rowohlt´s wife´s death, his estate in Lavigny, Switzerland became a writer´s colony. Many letters and papers, many books, as well as the tradition of intellectual exchange and hospitality were left to a foundation to develop. Everything about Ledig-Rowohlt´s life suggests that he appreciated individuality and favored it; that he was a multicultural person ahead of his time; that he himself was not known for neutrality--at least if it meant allowing prejudice to go unchecked. The telegram from Baldwin says something about both men.
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