Dear Marion,

Thank you very much for your letter. It provided me
with a thread which I believe will ultimately show the
way out of a labyrinth in which I have been perplexed
since adolescence. Here's the story: One day before or
after my senior high school year at Germantown Friends
School or my freshman year in college, i.e, sometime
between 1945 and 1947, my father asked me whether I would
like to drive with him to the local county seat, Marion, 
Virginia, named after Francis Marion, a Revolutionary War
general also nicknamed "the swamp fox," and no relation
to my cousin. It was a routine errand, nothing remarkable,
except that on this occasion, contrary to her habit, my
mother stayed home; and I was much pleased to have my
father's company all to myself for three or four hours.

At that time, the road across Iron Mountain was narrow and
winding, in many places not more than 12 or 14 feet wide,
steep and serpentine, with one very dramatic hair-pin turn,
surfaced with gravel and patches of mud. At the foot of
the mountain, leaving the forest, as it meanders into the
valley beside a small stream, the sides of the road become
lined with very modest houses, shacks of various configurations,
and a driver only recently concerned to avoid plunging off the
side of the steep mountain, now has to worry about not 
hitting a dog, or worse, an old man setting out his milk cans
for the truck to pick up. At the bottom, where the valley
broadens, we passed the emergency airport as usual empty
of planes, with its lone low beacon flashing red every
second, a reminder that somewhere other than here was a
highly industrialized civilization. The road then crossed
a one-lane bridge over the South Fork of the Holston River,
which in the dry season is not more than seven or eight
feet wide, but which can swell mightily in the rain.

Beyond the bridge, the road turns sharply to the right,
hugging the bank of the river. We hadn't been talking much,
little to say to each other. My father stopped, and waved
a hitch-hiker standing between the road and the river to
get into the back seat of the car. The hitch-hiker, like
ourselves, was headed to Marion. Naturally and unavoidably
a conversation ensued, and in a bizarre turn, focussed on
a particularly heinous crime that had recently been committed
in the vicinity. A Good Samaritan who had stopped to aid an
apparently stranded motorist had been brutally murdered by
the intended beneficiary of his good will. The mere recitation
cast a pall of horror over the three of us. The hitch-hiker,
perhaps to reassure his hosts that he represented no threat,
opined that the man who had committed that crime should be
put to death. I said nothing. My father said that the death
penalty was too benign a punishment, and stated what _he_ would
do. I can't remember, I have repressed the details of the
suggested punishment, but it must have been, if not torture,
something close to it.  I haven't been back over that stretch
of road for decades, but I believe I could identify, if it's
still there, the broad left turn, beside an open field, where
I raised my voice to be heard over the din of the engine.
"I wouldn't stoop that low," I said, steeped as I was at the
time in the Schickaneder Humanism of the Magic Flute:

"In diesen Heil'gen Hallen,
Wo Mensch den Menschen liebt,
Kann kein Verraeter lauern,
Weil man dem Feind vergiebt,"

and then, as I've realized for many years, dialectically,
repudiating the noble sentiment with the ultimate cruelty:

"Wen diese Lehren nicht erfreuen,
Verdienet nicht ein Mensch zu sein."

because obviously, if he doesn't deserve to be a human being, the
Geneva Conventions don't apply. My comment "I wouldn't stoop that low."
ended the conversation. My father said nothing. The hitch-hiker,
even though I had promised him prospective amnesty, didn't hit us
over the head or rob us. The three of us got safely to Marion,
and my father and I came back to Konnarock without incident.

It turned out, however, that I had deeply and irreparably injured
my father, by humiliating him, as he said, in front of a stranger.
He didn't complain right away, the wound was too deep for that.
It was only after three or four or five years, that he started to
complain about what I had done to him; "I wouldn't stoop so low."
he quoted me, when year after year, he continued to reproach me,
no matter how much I did for him and my mother, during the forty years
or so to the end of his life: "I wouldn't stoop so low." But I could
never understand why a matter-of-fact opinion, politely expressed,
should have been so painful: until I thought about your letters.

Now, I find myself once more confronted with the ultimately
insoluble jig-saw puzzle which I promised not to try to complete;
but it turns out: I have no choice. With the caveat that all my
surmises are tentative and subject to revision if not repudiation,
I suggest that Joel was afflicted with a violent temper and a
fantasy of violence, neither of which he could control, but for
which he atoned with generosity and affection. Discounting the
damage done to the Kleiderschrank when it cascaded from the second
story window to hit the ground, and discounting the emotional injury
from the corporal punishment of his sons, which I infer was neither
so frequent nor so severe that either of the surviving sons was
disabled by it, -  the problem of violence for Joel, which he
transmitted to both Heinz and Fritz, was, in true Teutonic style,
a problem of thought, a perplexity of reason wrestling with imagination,
of compulsion sparring with guilt: the ultimate apotheosis of Kantian
ethics, no longer merely "What must I do?" but much much more intrusively,
"What may I imagine, What may I think."  It was certainly for my father,
and I hope also for Fritz and Joel, a theoretical problem that tested
the limits of pure conscience rather than a practical one that tested
the parameters of the criminal law.  

It's an issue of some personal interest, because when on my
immatriculation at Harvard the authorities identified me as at risk
for mental illness, they induced me to submit to a psychological exam,
which I should never have done. They tested me with a sexually
suggestive picture to which I responded with a variant of "I wouldn't
stoop that low." citing Matthew 5:28: "But I say unto you, that
whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed
adultery with her already in his heart." That from a 16 year old boy
was enough to put me on the psychologists' "endangered" list, and I
suspect it may have contributed to the circumstance that diverse
academic opportunities such as a Fulbright fellowship to France
proved to be closed to me.

The relationships between a) what I do, b) what I talk or write about,
and c) what I imagine or think about, are very complex. I find it
essential to be permitted to express, without external or internal
censorship, what is on my mind, to write it or to say it to anyone
who is willing to listen. I consider it the most destructive
characteristic of my mothers' personality that she was insecure
to a degree that made it necessary for her to enforce a rigid
code of "political correctness" in the family. My father's life
was constrained by what he was permitted to say. Since speech is
essential for thought, my father was similarly limited in what 
he permitted himself to think. That is why my criticism of his
fantasies of torture touched so raw a nerve.

The issue of violence is pervasive.  No one knows how to respond
to the violence and cruelty of war, of colonialism, of capitalism,
of Bolshevism, of serfdom, of poverty, of prostitution.  There is
surely enough violence to go around. None of us is able to confront it.
As I try to express myself here, I find this afternoon, I can't
even write about it. I have tried to.  If you're interested in an
interpretation which I wrote perhaps seventeen years ago, you may,
but you don't have to, look at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~ernstmeyer/andere/K07.TXT

The scanned Kodachrome image which I attach, showed how my family
reacted to the violence of war: It shows my father, my mother,
Margaret and Klemens staring at the television images of Vietnam.
The pictures on the wall behind are of Rilke on the left,
and of Hermann Bang on the right.  My father internalized the
violence to which he was exposed. He was never able to describe,
at least not to me, what he saw in Buchenwald. What he had lived
through was sublimated for him in the pietistic Christianity
he assimilated from the music of J.S.Bach. Please don't think
that I am proselytizing. I'm just trying to explain.
There are many different cultures of Christianity: the
contemporary American religious right, with its obsession
with abortion, the death penalty, hunting, militarism
and weaponry of all kinds, has nothing to do with the tolerant
money-making pacifistic pietism of the Quakers. The highly
introspective German Protestant pietism of the Baroque,
as I interpret it, was a reaction to the savagery and slaughter
of the Thirty Years War, in the wake of which the crucified Jesus
became an emblem of the fate of a man in a hostile world.
My father consciously accepted his experiences in Buchenwald
as his fate, a shadow of the Crucifixion. I myself know
that I cannot comment on an experience that is not my own,
and I have always felt guilty to have escaped it.

With these comments, which I hope are not offensive to you, I have
again reached the boundary of what I am able to articulate in a letter.

Jochen