Who writes, stays. That is true of the authors of the letters I recently found in my basement. During a move, I came across a box of old memories. Inside were newspaper articles as well as postal and business cards. And dozens of letters. Their authors had been in this box for a proud 30 years and stayed in my head as a memory. At that time, as a teenager, I had taken part in camps run by the School and Student Mission SMD twice, to Sweden and to Norway. After that, of course, we kept in touch through letters.
Yes, the ones made of paper, written with a fountain pen or pen and provided with stamps (100 pfennigs back then). It was amazing what people had to say to each other back then! There was no Short (!) Message Service (SMS) and no Whatsapp. If you wrote someone a letter, it consisted of at least one page, and while you were at it, you could write on both sides. And so you told each other what you had done during the week, which thoughts seemed important, which book, which Bible verse or which conversation had stuck in your memory. Both took their time: the letter writer and the letter reader.
Have you noticed that most historical knowledge of the past few centuries comes in the form of letters? Who did what with whom, who met whom when and where, and the feelings of someone who lived in, say, the 17th century - all of which can still be traced today thanks to letters. In 300 years, who will still be examining old servers from Google, Web.de and GMX to see how people thought in the 21st century?
Paul wrote to the Apache
Christians constantly read and quote from letters, the New Testament consists of it, so to speak. "Paulus writes in the letter to the..." is so firmly part of the repertoire of a proper sermon that Robert Gernhardt has to be quoted again here with a poem: "Paulus wrote to the Apaches: You shouldn't clap after the sermon. (...) Paul wrote to the Iroquois: I won't write anything to you, learn to read first."
The Christian devotional reading is also full of correspondence. The letters between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer have just been published by SCM (“Beloved Dietrich”). The Scholl siblings' combative confessions were also heartbreaking. Martin Luther left hundreds of letters that are still theologically and historically significant today. Paper letters last for centuries; Even now, a few decades later, I can no longer read the floppy disks from my youth.
Some say that handwriting leads to better and more creative texts. The movements of the arm and hand supposedly activate similar brain regions as those for speaking and thinking. And if you want to remember things better, it's better to write them down by hand than with a keyboard. One thing is certain: Anyone who uses the small keyboard that is displayed on the smartphone is actually using a technical emergency solution for in between and is therefore forced to write shorter. But there are also said to be modern authors who have already written entire books on their cell phones, such as 16-year-old Max Sprenger, who was robbed of almost all movement possibilities in an accident and only used his thumb to tell his story about worrying and praying in " Tsunami in my head” (published as a book by adeo-Verlag).
Whoever writes a letter shows appreciation to the recipient. Not only that someone has put in a certain amount of effort (the writing itself, choosing the stationery and envelope, organizing the stamp and going to the mailbox). He or she also put more thought into the wording. It doesn't have to be a quill pen, but doesn't one feel a bit like a little Marcel Proust as soon as one runs the fountain pen over the paper?
Of course: Anyone who writes a letter assumes that the recipient has the time and, above all, enough patience to read it. But honestly, who would throw away a handwritten letter without reading it? If you really want to say something important, write a letter. A letter is and remains something personal. It is not for nothing that the personally signed letter still counts as proof of identification in some official matters. After I moved, my (quite modern) bank only believed my change of address after I had confirmed it in a signed letter.
Landscape description or snapshot
Imagine Paul writing an e-mail to the church in Corinth today. An e-mail is sent quickly, later ideas or links can always be sent in further e-mails or in a Whatsapp message. The text is with the recipient in a second, and if you want, even with 300 recipients. However, whoever sent a messenger on a journey in the 1st century AD exposed him to a walk of up to a few weeks as well as hardships and dangers. Even today, letter writers still think twice about adding anything before sealing the envelope. You sort your thoughts automatically, and that can't be a bad thing.
In the past, one would have been forced to describe a landscape through which one hiked on vacation and which remained particularly impressive in one's memory. Today you use your smartphone to take a photo that a moment later is at your loved one's home, maybe a few weeks' walk away. In any case, that doesn't exactly train one's own ability to express oneself.
No one says letters have to be long. "I would have liked to write a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time," wrote the devout mathematician Blaise Pascal. But when was the last time you tried to describe in your own words a long passage of text to a friend or family member what a certain mood was like out in nature, how it felt, what it reminded you of and why that moment was so magical ? How often do we describe how we are doing in written words today, and how often do we reach into the bag of tricks of the 360 face and person emojis (that's how many there are, including cats, elves and Santa Claus)?
There is one last reason for writing letters, and it is more relevant than ever: wood is known to be bound CO2. And global reforestation could absorb two-thirds of man-made CO2 emissions. This was the result of a study by ETH Zurich that was published two years ago and has been the subject of much discussion since then. What could be more obvious than to grow as many trees as possible specifically for paper production, so that the paper in the form of letters can be stored in moving boxes for at least 30 years? It can only mean – not only on World Letter Writing Day –: Write more letters!
