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As I review our correspondence, I am concerned that
the abandon with which I write should not be a source
of distress to you.  Obviously my topic: our family,
is from your perspective of as deep concern to you,
as from my perspective it is to me.  All families,
I believe, however necessary and inescapable they may be,
constitute burdens on their members, and in writing
to you about Onkel Heinz and Onkel Fritz, about our
grandparents, about Onkel Max and Tante Theodora,
and Onkel Georg, or George as he would have wanted
to be known, I must, if it is at all possible, avoid
transfering to you the burdens of which I divest myself.

It's sobering for me to meditate on how little I know about
my own father and mother, how much less about our grandparents
and even less about the associated relatives. As if I had on the
table in front of me an enormously multifarious jigsaw puzzle,
most of whose pieces are irretrievably inaccessible to me, and
those that I have at hand don't seem to fit into any consistent
pattern. To be sure, from a single piece or two, I can extrapolate
a picture which is consistent and persuasive: that's because the
picture is my invention. If I find additional puzzle pieces they
usually don't fit and disrupt the schema I have presumptuously
laid out.

Let me be specific with reference to our grandfather, Joe or Joel
Meyer. My father, Heinz, related to me often enough, Joel's
criticism of Heinz's interest, while studying in Muenchen and
Goettingen in music and art. Joel thought such interest was a
waste of economic resources. Yet Klemens discovered in Hajo
Meyer's autobiographical sketch a description of Hajo's
grandmother Theodora, who was Joel's sister, as a woman versed
not only in the German "classics", but so fluent in Latin and
Greek as to be able to read those classics in the original.
I have a vivid memory of Onkel Fritz on the porch where I
am sitting now, stepping across the threshold into my father's
study, and surprising me with an extemporaneous and beautifully
articulated rendition of one of Schiller's ballads. It's
probably not exactly what passed between him and George.
On the bookshelf just a few feet from where I am sitting is an
ornate 10 volume edition of Schillers Werke inscribed:
"Ernst Meyer, Oerlinghausen, von Oncel Albert & Tante Selma
Rosenthal in Haspe, Zur Einsegnung den 26. Mai 1909",
and next to it, a five volume edition of "Lessings Werke"
inscribed "Ernst Meyer, Oerlinghausen, von Oncel Albert & Tante
Marta Rosenberg in Osnabrueck, zur Einsegnung am 26. Mai 1909,
and further, a four volume edition of "Heinrich Heine's
Saemtliche Werke" inscribed "Ernst Meyer zu seiner Einsegnung
von seinen Eltern 26/V/09. It appears that for his Bar Mitzvah,
instead of Hebrew devotional texts, Ernst Joachim Meyer received
editions of the German "classical" authors most receptive to Jewish
culture. On the wall, above this bookshelf, set in a broad black
frame is the facsimile document Onkel Ernst sent to his parents
as a souvenir from France shortly before his death:

Declaration des Droits des L'Homme et du Citoyen,
_    Decretes par l'Assemblee Nationale
dans le seances des 20.21,23,24 et 26 aout 1789
_           acceptes par le roi.

Centered on the lower frame is a silver plaque
with the legend:

_        Andenken an unseren Sohn
_          Ernst Joachim Meyer
_gefallen am 6. Nov 1914 bei Souchez (Frank)

The plaque is surmounted not with a Magen David,
but with an Iron Cross.

My father related to me that in the context of his own
university education, Fritz was resentful, because apparently
to send him to the university no money was available.
My father also told me that in the course of his relatively
brief business career, Joel twice lost all his assets
to bankruptcy. One must try to imagine Joel's financial
anxieties in the years of depression and hyperinflation
after the war. These were the years when Heinz's studies
were depleting the family coffers. It was in these years
that Joel complained of Heinz's pursuit of "brotlose Kuenste."
Perhaps this time it was the son who was not sufficiently
sensitive to the emotional needs of his father. I don't know.

A second issue that puzzles me is how Joel, Elfriede, Ernst,
Fritz and Heinz came to terms with problems of violence,
within and without the family. On the one hand, the image
of family harmony expressed by Joel's tolerance and generosity
toward his gentile daughter-in-law; on the other hand, there
is my father's enigmatic fascination with the imperative:
Landgraf werde hart! (Landgrave get tough!), there is my
father's reference that when matters did not suit him, Joel
might pound the dinner table with his fist so violently that
table silver or china were hurled to the floor; there is
the embarrassingly brutal estimate of an insufficient number
of lampposts to take care of priests and rabbis; and then
there is my father's account, so deeply engraved in his 
spirit that he repeated it on his deathbed, that after he
was rescued on breaking through thin ice onto which he
had ventured in foolhardy disobedience, Joel gave him a
thorough spanking; a reaction with which I have no empathy
when I consider what I would do subsequent my child's rescue
from such an almost fatal catastrophe. In scenes of family
discord, my mother sometimes chided my father as being "brutal".
Yet I don't know why she said that. To the best of my
knowledge, he never laid hands on her, certainly not on
my sister or myself. I remember a touching occasion in 1940
or 1941, when Margrit and I tried unsuccessfully to nurse
to adulthood a robin that had fallen out of its nest.
My father was realistically critical of our misguided
attempts. One morning we found the fledgling dead in the
box that we had appointed for its nest; and I vividly
remember my father's embarrassment at our transient
suspicion that he might have killed the little bird. 
I don't know what to make of all this. I can't put the
puzzle together. Maybe it's a mistake to try.

The real problem, as I think I understand it now, is that we
deceive ourselves when we presume to be historians and to be
able to retrieve the past. Our efforts are illusory. I can
no more divine our grandparents' personalities than I can
know the thoughts and feelings of a Jewish burgher and his
wife from the impressive portrait that Rembrandt or Vermeer
might have painted of them. The image that we create is not
an image of past reality. It is an image of present reality,
which cannot reach, much less exhaust the past; but sometimes
the retrospective makes it more meaningful.  The predicaments
that I discern: the incompatibility between wanting to be
something special (etwas Besonderes) and being integrated
into a society, such as my parents confronting George's
studied mediocrity;  the trauma of rejection because of
a quasi-territorial conflict, as between Margot and Marga;
the pain engendered by unavoidable schism, such as between
Heinz and Fritz; all these, it seems to me, are universal
and inescapable, are to be accepted rather than lamented.
Understanding all this makes it easier for me to accept
that my sister has consistently rejected me for the past
sixty or seventy years; and she's not the only one.

Its important to understand, that a person who is something
special is rejected not for what he does, but for what he is.
Arguably one can desist from a pattern of action that offends,
but one can't change the person that one is, - although change
might gradually, incrementally be induced by environmental
pressures. The classical example is Jesus, who is said to have
done no wrong, but who was, nonetheless "despised and rejected
of men."  The original Greek has it that Jesus "scandalized"
those who recognized him. I won't try to transliterate the Greek.
The English tranlators refer to him as "offending" or being
a cause of offence. Luther uses the term "Aergernis". He
writes: "In dieser Nacht werdet Ihr Euch alle aergern an mir."
(This night all ye shall be offended because of me.)
As for the conundrum of confronting someone who is special
(etwas Besonderes) or of oneself being someone special,
I can think of no solution except that suggested by Goethe's
dictum: "Gegen die grossen Vorzuege eines Anderen, gibt es
kein Rettungsmittel als die Liebe." (Aus Ottilien Tagebuch,
Wahlverwandtschaften) (Love is the only instrument of rescue
from the overwhelming virtue of a neighbor.) But it's not
that simple, love (agape as distinct from eros) is not a
panacea, because in addition to being loved and esteemed,
each of us also has a need to be left alone; a need for
solitude and even for loneliness. It's a mistake to presume
to be able to design and to construct an emotional
(or spiritual) environment entirely free of all distress,
as it is a mistake to demand a life entirely free of illness.
It won't happen.

The past is not past. The only past that we understand is the
present. We have not, - we cannot - and we will never absolve
the past. Our lives are its confirmation. History is now.
De nobis fabula narrabitur. The conventional reaction to the
saga whose outlines we have sketched might be expected to be
a recapitulation of the past, in that each of us would feel
a duty of loyalty to our parents to argue their respective 
causes, to defend their positions and to adopt their claims,
perpetuating the adversary relationship. My experience, however,
is different. With respect to my own parents, I no longer
feel a need to champion their causes. That was a role which I
passionately discharged, hardly with respect to your family 
but rather to those of their adversaries who were truly
threatening and dangerous, primarly, believe it or not, the
United Lutheran Church in America. Of course I have the same
feeling of affection for Onkel Fritz that I have always had,
but you may have difficulty with my meaning, and should consider
my discussion of dialectic in an earlier context, when I profess
for Tante Margot a kind of reverence and awe. In the first place,
it is necessary to assume that she herself experienced some of
the distress that her personality - with regard to which she was
utterly helpless - inflicted on those she loved. None of us can
assess the magnitude of her unhappiness, especially when it 
remained concealed, as it almost certainly did. In the second
place, I consider her my teacher. The lesson that I try to learn
from her rejection of my family and myself addresses by far the
most important challenge that I have faced in my life and that I
continue to face. For whatever reason, to be rejected by members
of my family, to be an outcast from my family such as was my
mother, appears to be the inevitable consequence of the sort
of person I am, the price of my being myself; and having had the
opportunity to learn through Tante Margot, makes it easier, much easier
to manage - I'll stay away from the pathetic expression: "to bear".
I of course can't speak for my father or for my mother, - but so
far as I am concerned, when I think of Tante Margot, I think of
the epigram Goethe composed for his friend Schiller: "Seine 
durchgewachten Naechte haben unsern Tag erhellt." That's all I
can say in a letter. What's beyond that has to find its place
in some novel or in some poem.

Jochen