Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

Question 80: Karen Blixen on Bror Blixen

Q. Did Karen and Bror Blixen ever see each other again after her final departure from Africa (from mid-1931 to 1946 when Bror was killed in a car accident)?

A. As far as I know, they never saw each other again. Karen Blixen has some salty things to say about Bror in her Breve fra Danmark (Letters from Denmark), 1931-1962.

On August 23, 1934, she writes to Gustav Mohr: "When I think of Bror--which, I must say, is rare--it seems impossible to imagine a worse bastard."

However, on April 18, 1946, she writes to her cousin Sophie Bernstorff-Gyldensteen: "The death of Bror has affected me more than I would have thought... I think of him sadly; he had, it seems to me, great possibilities, even a kind of genius, like all the Blixens, and yet something in his character failed. It wasn't great faults that prevented me from getting along with him, but his little lies on a daily basis: the fact that he borrowed money from my African workers, promising them that I myself would pay them back. . . He mortgaged everything I owned, and he dragged me into business agreements in which he hid one or two little clauses that ended up sabotaging the entire endeavor."

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