Dear Marion,

Please accept my apologies for the length and the intricacy
of this letter. When I sit down to write, some demon takes
control, and I am helpless. I'm not offended if you don't
take the time or make the effort to read what I write. -
Nobody else does. But once its written, it might as well be sent.

Let me elaborate on the epithet "Landgraf werde hart!"
- Landgrave get tough, is a demand for law and order from a
medieval smith, near whose smithy a much too tender-hearted
Count had lost his way and spent the night. The angry smith,
unaware of the proximity of the VIP visitor, as he pounded
upon a sword on the anvil, pretended the sword was the count,
and cursed: Landgrave get tough! The count overheard his
exasperated subject's exhortations and got the message,
extirpated corruption from his dominions, and everybody
lived happily ever after.  What this story might have meant
to my father puzzles me.  To postulate competition between
tender- and toughmindedness in the adolescent spirit,
is obvious and easy, - but doesn't mean much.

There is in one of my previous accounts an error to be corrected:
My mother's grandparents in whose second story apartment
above the corner grocery at Kastanienallee 23, she grew up,
were August und Katharine Roessner, not Doering as I mistakenly
wrote.  Doering was my great-grandmother's maiden name. August,
as Klemens reported, repaired Singer sewing machines. My mother,
if I understood her correctly, reported to me that her grandmother
worked in a cannery whose Jewish owner, Schmalbach, my greatgrandmother
successfully defended against anti-semitically inspired charges
that he preyed on his female employees. On our second and last
return visit to Braunschweig in 1990, I thought I recognized
Katharine Roessner in a group picture of Schmalbach employees
on display in a municipal museum an dem Burgplatz. For the sake
of historical accuracy, I note the discrepancies that according to:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konservenindustrie_in_Braunschweig#Schmalbach_1898
the Schmalbach factory was located on Hamburgerstrasse, which
would have been too distant for an employee whose home was on
Kastanienallee, and the Schmalbach brothers who operated that
factory in those years are not identified as Jewish, - although
they might have been. My mother's account may well be apocryphal,
but if so, it's all the more evidence of her determination to
emphasize her family's sympathy for Judaism.

As Klemens reported, my mother born on November 23, 1898, was the
illegitimate child of Bertha Roessner, a strikingly beautiful, but
obviously not too responsible young woman, who declined to divulge the
name of the father, from whom I have always surmised my mother inherited
her extraordinary intelligence and perhaps also her unusual sensitivity.
After my mother's birth, Bertha was taken back by her devoted admirer,
Karl Schwarz, who had wooed her all along, but whom she had previously
spurned. Karl was now happy to marry her and retrieve her from her disgrace.
It was Karl's parents, whom my sister and I were once taken to visit in
their dingy Berlin apartment, when we were very young and they were very
old, - as old or older than I am now, - who insisted that the illegitimate
infant who had been grandiosely baptized as Margarethe Wilhelmine in
addition to other, even more bombastic first names that I have forgotten
and that my mother was too embarrassed to repeat, - should not be a member
of their son's household. My mother, therefore, was taken to Braunschweig
to be brought up by her grandparents. She began life as an outcast from
her own family, became in early adult life an outcast from her people
because she had married a Jew, and ended her life as an outcast from
her adopted family because she was not a Jewess. In this role as the
perennial exile, my mother now assumes in my imagination an heroic stature
that I had not previously recognized.

Probably it was the presence of young children in the family, together
with the deaths of my father's parents which explain the increasingly
essential role that my maternal grandmother and her husband, whom my
sister and I called grandpa - Opapa - played in our lives. If anything,
the Nazi persecution of the Jews only increased their affection for us.
If my memory does not deceive me, from 1934 through 1937 my sister and
I spent at minimum a week or two each year, staying with my grandparents
at Hoiruperstrasse 7, in Berlin-Nikolassee, often enough that der
Potsdamer Bahnhof, where the train from Braunschweig arrived and Margrit
and I were met by Onkel Hans, Tante Grete, Omama and/or Opapa, became
a familiar destination.

On November 9, 1938, we kept an appointment at the American Consulate
in Hamburg for issuance of Visas to permit us to enter the United States.
That night we stayed in the house of my mother's half-brother Walter
in Hamburg-Hoheneichen. The next day, when our train pulled into the
Hauptbahnhof in Braunschweig, the newspaper frontpages detailed the
revages of the Kristallnacht. My parents could not know whether our
apartment had been ransacked. The train to Berlin was about to depart
on an adjacent track. My sister and I were never taken home, but my
mother bought tickets for us, telephoned her half-brother Hans that
we were coming and sent us on our way. My parents took a taxi to
Schleinitzstrasse 1. Our apartment was intact. An hour or two after
their return, the police arrived. My father was arrested and shipped
to Buchenwald.

In the final months of her life, when she was already severely demented
my mother's glassy stare would on occasion melt into a limpid smile as
she looked at me and said: "Suesser Trost in meinem Herzen, Meine Pflicht
hab' ich getan," - das kannst Du wirklich sagen." (Sweet consolation
in my heart that I have done my duty, - you have a right to say that.)
The citation from the libretto of Beethoven's Fidelio has always struck
me as a misunderstanding, because my relationship to my parents was never
determined by a sense of duty.  Rather I interpret these final words of a
fiercely determined mind, as an index of the meaning that the Fidelio
drama of bourgeois idealism had acquired in our family tradition. For
from the onset of the Nazi terror until my father's death, my mother
invested all the resources at her disposal to her family's survival,
from making my father's medical practice a social and economic success
to saving him from murder at the hands of the Nazis, - and in both she
succeeded. I always considered it a mark of good taste that my parents
never made explicit references to her role as my father's Leonore.
She never donned men's clothes in the pursuit of her goals, but when it
was necessary she flouted her Aryan credentials - and whether they were real
only Bertha Roessner would have known - first in 1934 with the Nazi Labor
Minister Hans Seldte to secure my father's continuing license to practice
medicine, then in 1938 with the officers of the Gestapo who had become
his patients in consequence of that practice, to secure his release from
Buchenwald and make it possible for him to flee to the United States. It
wasn't easy. Once he had reached safety in New York City, it fell to her
to dissolve the household, to arrange for the family belongings to be
crated and shipped, and finally to retrieve her children from their
grandparents' care in Berlin and take them with her to Bremerhaven,
to leave behind die Sprache und die Kultur that meant so much to her.
Meanwhile in Germany, the Nazi authorities had been suggesting to her
that she should divorce her Jewish husband, while in New York City,
her sister-in-law had been suggesting to, or even urging, her husband
to divorce his gentile wife.

==>

It becomes obvious as I write one letter after the other,
that your telephone call and your letter have become occasion
for me to compose what I have long had in mind: a recitation
of the history of my family, a recitation which is addressed
to you as Onkel Fritz's daughter only elliptically and which you
should therefore read, if you read it at all, with scepticism and
irony, which you should under no circumstances take personally.

My father left Bremerhaven on December 7, 1938 on the steamship
"Hansa", and must have arrived in New York eight days later
on December 15. From that day until March 31, of the following
year he lived with Onkel Fritz and Tante Margot in their 
apartment at 1781 Riverside Drive. In my files in Belmont,
there are probably letters from him to my mother in Germany;
letters which I shall now try to find, and on which, if
successful, I shall report to you. I don't expect any such
account in the letters, but after my parents were reunited, 
my father confessed to my mother that Margot had talked to
him about divorcing her. 

We had arrived on a Friday. That night and Saturday night,
I slept on Onkel Georg's examining table in his Broadway
apartment/office. I assume that Heinz, Marga and Margrit
slept in your parents' apartment, but I don't really know.
Subsequently, I suspect within a day or two, my parents
rented an apartment on 161st Street, but the impossible
logistics of accommodating me at Onkel Georg's while my
parents and Margrit slept 39 blocks away would have precluded
such a move at least until the following Monday, after I
had been deported to Chappaqua, and Margrit to White Plains.
I don't know what transpired between your parents and mine
during that period of transition, but it wasn't pleasant.
The months and years that ensued were very difficult for
my father in his and for my mother in her own way. The
difficulties for me gradually abated after I had been
reunited with my parents at the end of the summer. I think
my sister had an easier time of it. I myself have no memory
of seeing Onkel Fritz and Tante Margot again until years
later. Probably we stopped for a short visit in the summer
of 1945, when we lived for a few weeks in rented rooms in
New Rochelle, while my father was commuting into the City
to take a postgraduate course in radiology, preliminary to
the installation of an X-ray machine in his office in
Konnarock.

As the summer of 1939 ended, my fathers' apostasis was not
very far advanced. He himself had no commitment to any formal
religion. His children had been baptized in Germany to camouflage
their semi-Judaism. In those months my father had no need of any
religious formalities. What he needed was an environment in which
he could practice his profession.  As a thought experiment, I try
to imagine how our lives would have devolved if in the summer
of 1939, a Jewish executive with the tolerance and generosity
of our grandfather, had offered both my parents positions of
responsibility, let us say in a Jewish hospital, or a Jewish
nursing home, or a Jewish retirement community. I suspect my
father's "conversion" would have been arrested, it might even
have been reversed. He would never have become an orthodox or
observant Jew, - but neither was his father, but he would
certainly not have been baptized. You will agree with me that
such a fantasy is very unrealistic. Tante Margot's passionate
philosemitism, if you will permit me to call it that, was far
more representative of contemporary American Jewish culture
than Joe Meyer's enlightened and generous tolerance. My father
"converted" to American Lutheranism because that community
opened its arms to him in a way that, to put it mildly, was
beyond the capacity of the Jewish establishment.

My father, were he alive today, would very much disagree with
my analysis.  He was very critical of persons who adopted
religious convictions as a matter of expediency.
He was a passionate believer in "free will".
He was adamant that his convictions were a matter of choice for 
him and an expression of what he "decided" was the "right" thing
to do. But he was not an astute psychologist. To me it is obvious
that the classical adage: cujus regio, ejus religio is a fact of
nature which few can even partially escape, and none can escape
entirely. What is more obvious than that the child is under the
rule (regio) of its parents, and therefore it acquires its parents'
faith (religio).  Later in life, the dominating spouse inflicts
its faith on the spouse that is dominated. 

When you write: "My father, with his fierce, unbendable loyalties
and commitments, could not get over your father's conversion from
Judaism," you are correct, but only if you acknowledge that those
fierce, unbendable loyalties and commitments were loyalties and
commitments to your mother or to your mother's flavor of Judaism,
not to the Judaism of Joe(l) Meyer in which Ernst Joachim and Fritz and
Heinz were brought up. There's nothing wrong with that. Such fierce
unbendable loyalty to ones spouse makes for a happy marriage.

The sentence in which you write of your father:
"He considered it (Heinz's conversion) an offense to their parents."
is more problematic. If you interpret Heinz's "conversion" as
his marriage to Marga Roessner, then you must reconcile this
claim with the fact that Marga Roessner was escorted to her
civil marriage in Oerlinghausen by Fritz holding her left hand
and Joe(l) holding her right hand, with Joe(l) declaring in 
the presence of his more observant wife:"Ich habe selbst ein
Christenkind fast geheiratet." (I almost married a Christian girl
myself.) If, on the other hand, you interpret Heinz's conversion
as his decision to become a "medical missionary" in southwest
Virginia for the United Lutheran Church in America, then you
must accept his "baptism" as analogous to malaria or typhoid
prophylaxis required of him prior to embarking on a mission
into the jungle. From what I know about Joe(l), I think he might
have approved of this "conversion" as a pragmatic act of survival,
and I rather suspect he might have been somewhat critical of
Heinz's expulsion from the family. About Elfriede, I don't know.
She let me scream for a month.

I myself profess no public religion, but intellectually, I 
consider myself very much a disciple of dialectic, i.e. I derive
satisfaction from showing that it is almost always possible to
reinterpret a given set of facts or circumstances in terms of
contradicting theory. In this spirit, if one accepts Joel Meyer's
Lessing-like tolerance: "Ich habe selbst ein Christenkind fast
geheiratet," as the "true religion", then it would be Fritz rather
than Heinz who was the apostate. Whatever Heinz's beliefs might
have been, they never included the premise that his brand of
public religion was the only true path to salvation. Heinz was
never critical of any person who did not share his beliefs, as I
did not; he never accused me of having betrayed his faith. He
never attempted to "convert" any one to his point of view. A
recurring mantra for him was the devise of Frederick the Great:
"In meinem Staate soll jeder nach seiner Fasson selig werden."
"In my state each person shall find salvation after his own 
fashion." Heinz never expressed any belief that could have been
construed as even remotely anti-semitic, and neither did Marga, -
although it might be argued that she had cause.

==>

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