Thank you for your letter. It seems obvious that 
we are interested in many of the same problems of
social ethics. My experience suggests to me that
the simple exposition of ideas is often ineffective
in communicating them, and that, when we undertake
to demonstrate our beliefs by means of explicit
statements, we convince not each other but only
ourselves.  I believe to set forth ones ideas in
an historical context, as your appear to me to be
doing, is often very effective in making oneself 
understood. My own thinking is so convoluted, and
my exposition so abstruse, that not even on the
Bonhoeffer maillist do I seem to find customers
for my (pseudo)intellectual merchandise.

In response to your question, whether I have made
other notes of my childhood experiences, I seem to
remember a statement of yours on the Bonhoeffer list
to the effect that you do not read German. If I am
mistaken, and if German prose is indeed accessible
to you, I have voluminous notes, a chapter from a novel,
as well as correspondence concerning my memories of
Nazi Germany, some of which might be of interest to you.

From earliest childhood I have harbored, for reasons
not far to seek, distrust and fear of governments and
institutions which purport to control the lives of
individuals, the historical, secular church, included.
As a child I was terrified of police, and remember running
away when I saw a policeman coming. Not that I had _done_
anything wrong; but I felt that the state was hostile to me,
and I reciprocated that hostility, in thought if not in deed.
One of my earliest insights into the societal dilemma
occurred when I was still in grade school, and concluded
that there was no more reason to fear the unpredictable
vagaries of government, than to fear natural forces, fires
or hurricanes and the disasters they bring upon men.

Years later it occurred to me that the imperfections of 
society might indeed be construed as pathophysiologic
deficiencies, and that the physician's tolerance when he
studies and treats physical illness might well be applied
to the study and treatment of the illnesses of society.
I consider the exclusion of value judgment from the
interpretation of pathophysiologic phenomena in medicine
the most important of the legacies of Hippocratic tradition.
The physician does not blame the asthmatic for his asthma
nor the blind man for his glaucoma. The state's attorney,
of course, demands punishment irrespective of his victim's
insanity.

Consequently I try to look at the turmoil of political life
without condemnation. I try to understand without fear of
the future, my own or my children's, the processes by which
societies flourish and decay and die. I try to maintain my
detachment from moral judgment in the face of all provocation,
the Siberian prisons of which Dostoevsky wrote, the massacres
of the American Indians, the slave trade, the annihilation of
entire nations of which the Old Testament is proud, the
destruction of cities by aerial bombardment, be they Coventry,
Dresden, Hiroshima, the defoliation of the Vietnamese jungle,
the maniacal accumulation of nuclear, chemical and biological
weapons. There is a quantitative difference between those
atrocities and those of Buchenwald and Dachau, Auschwitz and
Theresienstadt; but is there really a qualitative difference?
Perhaps you can help me find an answer to that question.

Just recently I read an op-ed article in the New York Times
entitled "The People's Holocaust" which asserted without offering
very much in the way of proof that ordinary Germans participated
gleefully in the murdering of the Jews. The intended implication
it seemed to me was that all, or at any rate most Germans were
guilty of the atrocities for which one has been accustomed to blame
the SS or the Gestapo. I was reminded of analogous accusations by
historians: A.J.P. Taylor comes to mind; and I thought I detected
some symmetry in this demonization of the Germans with the demonization
which has for centuries plagued the Jews; and that there was in fact
a parallelism between anti-teutonism and antisemitism; that as zealots
hold all Jewry responsible for the crucifixion, so zealots hold all
Germans responsible for the Holocaust. This consideration brings me
back to Saul's encounter with the witch of Endor, and his realization
that he has become that which he most abhorred.  I detect in the need
to find a scapegoat a basic propensity of human nature; and I suspect
that if one searches conscientiously one will find not a single epoch
in human history in which mankind has managed to live without scapegoats,
not only the Jews, but the Blacks, the Indians, the Catholics, the Irish,
the Japanese, the Chinese, the Muslims, the Turks, and of course most
recently, the Communists. It is almost as if, in order to function,
society needed something to despise, perhaps to persecute.