Dear friends and family,


thank you very much that you have taken the effort to come here to commemorate with me the anniversary of Leonora´s life and death.

I know that it has been very difficult for many of you to organise time and means of transportation to come up here and I am very grateful for this gesture of concernedness and friendship.


It is very difficult for most of us to renew the remembrance of Leonora`s suffering and edurance without also thinking on one`s own experiences and psychic changes during this time, a very similar feeling of pain and continuity. And while thinking and reflecting about it comes also the rememrance of a permanent exposure to feelings oft the extreme.

For sure, many of such thoughts and living memories have risen in most of you and I know how painful they can be. But since we all - one way or the other - share the same pains and sorrows it is also a feeling of closeness connected to it, that I felt was worth preserving and caring for.


I have therefore not arranged our gathering for Leonora`s memorial in a restaurant or hotel, because I would like to preserve and reinforce this experience of connectedness in a network of friendship and – as in a situation that Leonora liked to call an „ extended family-situation“ – it did not seem necessary to emphasize the exteriors so much. On the contrary, I hope that the obvious limitations of my private ambiente may contribute to a more spontaneous mode of communication and exchange of ideas between all of us.


The world has changed since Leonora has left us: not only on my personal level but also in politics; September 11 was the day that her organs failed and that she had to be put onto the artificial kidney. We nevertheless watched the events in New York from her TV set in the transplant unit and I found my temporary consolation in sharing the grief and horror with so many other people.


But even if the world and the psychological climate oft he world have changed I think it is worthwhile to preserve and nourish on a personal level the world in which Leonora felt happy and secure and for which she wanted to carry on. It is a world of exschange and mutuality and it is a world which we want to hand over to the next generations.


Although all our common efforts were not able to save Leonoras`s physical life, I hope that her ideas and personality will live on. And even if it was not pssible to save Leonora`s life, all of you have together certainly saved mine.

May you all be blessed!