Liebe Margrit,
.PP
.fi
.na
I don't know whether you will feel better
if I try to answer your letter to Margaret.
I am always concerned that what I say might just make things worse,
but since implicit in any letter is a request for a reply,
I think I would be remiss if I did not at least make an effort.
There are several separate items about which I might comment.
.PP
I really don't think I have been unkind to you
or done you wrong, at least not for many years.
I take your accusation that I prevented you from
developing a relationship to Klemens at face value.
My memory for what happened twenty or thirty years
ago is perhaps not very good.
But so far as I can remember,
nothing prevented you from coming to visit us
whenever and for however long you wanted,
and forming with Klemens whatever relationship you wished.
It is true that for many years
you asked Klemens to visit you without us.
He did not accept your invitation because he didn't want to come,
and the reason he didn't want to come is because you asked
him to come without us,
and he didn't want to be separated from us.
.PP
Underlying your complaint is the assumption that
it is desirable for a relative or family friend like yourself
to take a child from its parents and to give the child
an experience independent of and perhaps adverse to
the parental environment.
What proportion of intelligent adults would 
share that assumption, I don't know.
But not I.
What you are really complaining about is
the closeness of Klemens relationship to us.
I admit, I did not arrange for him to go to visit you
in the way that parents customarily arrange
for their children to go to camp.
Parents do this,
because their children get on their nerves,
and they don't know what to do with their children.
That is why we got sent to Juist and to Berlin.
But Klemens never got on my nerves,
and I never wanted to send him away.
It was he who did not wish to come without us,
and it was not I who prevented him from coming.
Did I really have an obligation to send him away from me?
.PP
Neither Mutti and Papa nor Margaret's parents ever asked Klemens
to visit them without us.
As a matter of fact, he visited Mutti and Papa by himself
only once, and that was when he was twenty three years old,
and Margaret's parents he never visited by himself at all. 
But even if he had, such visits to his grandparents
could not be interpreted as any neglect of you.
You might have cause to complain if he had visited
his other aunts and uncles, Alex, Janet, *)
.FS
*) The only exception is a ten day visit to Dobbs Ferry,
just after he had finished medical school,
to take care of Robert Bingham as he was dying.
.FE
or Peter,
but he never did, and none of
.ul
them
accuse Margaret or myself of having interfered
with their relationship to him.
.PP
The root of your dissatisfaction with me
is your inability to accept the differences between us.
You measure me against your friends as a standard,
and take offence that I am different from them.
Well, I
.ul
am
different from them,
I refused to send my child to a day care center
or to a kindergarten, or to camp,
to Sunday School or to church.
I regarded formal schooling as an unavoidable evil.
I have many patients whom I like very much
and to whom I am very generous,
but I have no friends such as you have;
and I don't want any.
I want only to take care of my family.
.PP
Your relationship to Rebekah and Nathaniel is,
as I wrote you in my last letter,
an issue not between us,
but between yourself and Klemens and Laura.
I think it is destructive for you to blame me
for Klemens' and Laura's refusal to let you
take charge of their children.
I also don't think you should fight
with Klemens and Laura over it. 
As I wrote to you in my last letter,
none of Laura's uncles or aunts have made such a request
nor have Janet, Peter or Alex,
and to none of them would such a request be granted.
I can imagine circumstances,
if you lived nearby and the children knew you well,
and you were willing to take care of them
as an agent of their parents and according to
their parents' instructions,
that the kind of arrangement you desire
would evolve naturally,
but the attempt to force such an arrangement
by threatening to cut yourself of from your family
unless your demand was granted
is, to say the least, counterproductive,
and if I were you,
I would apologize to Klemens and Laura
for having made it.
.PP
As for the question of whether
we should spend a few days in Konnarock together,
the answer is yes, but I think it would be very desirable
that we should have some very frank
telephone conversations beforehand.
I don't think we should plan
to meet in Konnarock in order to fight.
I construe my feelings about being together
in the context of my childhood memories,
when our family, Papa, Mutti, and you were the only
society that had any meaning to me, and when my
only concern, and the only real prayers that I every
prayed were that we should "always" remain together.
This attitude clearly has much to do with the separation
anxiety which so dominated my early childhood.
You can probably see the consistency of my behavior,
my anxiety about separation from Mutti and Papa
was replaced by my reluctance to be separated from
Margaret and Klemens, and it does not take a psychoanalyst
to see that the relationship which I have built to Klemens
is the one that I wished I could have had to my own father.
The efforts I have put
into the preservation of the Konnarock house, 
my buying the house next door for Mutti and Papa,
the care that I took of them in Konnarock
rather than in a nursing home,
the substantial gifts I have made to Klemens
and his family and to you,
are all expressive of my desire to preserve my family
of which you are and always will always be a part.