A Time to Love, a Time to Die

Republished, with a foreword by Josephine Loewenstein.

A Time to Love, A Time to Die was originally published in 1971, and became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. It has since gone unduly forgotten. Now, this tale of life, death, love and heartache is republished, and with a foreword by Leopold Loewenstein’s daughter-in-law, Princess Josephine Loewenstein.

Prince Loewenstein had spent over 20 years of complete happiness with his wife Diana Gollancz. And then Diana was found to be fatally ill.

In this heart-rending account, Loewenstein carefully notes the progression of his wife’s disease, in this case cancer – the gradual loss of faculties, the abrupt oases of hope and contentment, the recurring awareness, for both, of what lay ahead. Diana, who died at forty-six, had been fastidious in her intellectual and artistic amusements and avocations. During her illness she would make pathetic attempts to order her darkness and pain: ‘I am like a spaceman shot into space without training. . . . I must not go off my head.’

As Diana and her husband face a “world of the Unknown,” the one gradually withdraws; the other examines his own protective mechanisms and his religious faith, and questions the rightness of one human being watching another in the agony of death.

PRINCE LEOPOLD LÖWENSTEIN left Germany in the 1920s, after his brother (Hubertus zu Loewenstein) wrote a book foreshadowing the rise of the Nazi Party. His first marriage, by which he produced a son (Rupert Loewenstein) was short-lived, and he later fell in love with and married Diana Gollancz, daughter of the publisher Victor Gollancz. As a young man he told his father that he wished to become a doctor, only to be met with the rejoinder, ‘You call the Doctor, you don’t become a Doctor.’ In later life he gatecrashed medical conferences and pursued an amateur interest in psychiatry, writing what is widely believed to be the first ‘self-help’ book, See Yourself As You Really Are

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