I only met Onkel Fritz a few times, and I regret that.
I remember him from the years before we left Damascus,
when he and Tante Margot would come to visit in the summer.
I remember him pulling the photographs out of his Polaroid camera,
the first that I had ever seen;
I may be imagining it,
but I wonder whether Heinz's manner suggested
that his was New York gimmickery.
I think that Jochen took a slide showing Margot and Fritz
leaning over a new photograph,
although I don't think that the technology
to allow the pictures to develop before your eyes,
exposed to light, was available in the summer of 1961 or 1962.
Tante Margot frightened me.
She looked to me like an older version of my aunt Margrit ('Marky'),
but I didn't know her and didn't trust her as I trusted Margrit.
Margot was enthusiastically friendly,
she wanted me to sit on her lap,
and her hands had a very strong grip on my little wrist.
I am not sure what it was about the lap that frightened me.
Perhaps it was just that she mis-read my developmental stage,
and I was embarrassed by sitting on laps.
(That was about the time at which I used ask women
who commented fatuously on how I had grown
whether I wasn't supposed to grow,
and I think she may have been one of them.)
But I wonder whether I sensed the tension
between her and my grandmother, Marga,
and whether allowing Margot to hold me represented a form of disloyalty.
I also remember Marion arriving one summer day -
I am not sure whether or not it coincided with a visit by her parents -
on a motor scooter, riding behind her boyfriend or husband.
I had never seen a motor scooter before.
Within hours, they were off again, down the gravel road.
It was very exciting.

We visited in New York once, in the evening,
and the cover to the trunk lock, decorated with red,
blue and white plastic in the shape of the Buick symbol,
was stolen from our new car.
Onkel Fritz explained that this was happening a lot.
I had never been in an apartment before.
I remember walking from room to room as the adults talked.
(As always in my father's family, I was the only child,
only grandchild, only niece or nephew, only grandnephew.
That was how the world was.)
Tante Margot seemed more benign. We did not stay overnight;
I don't know that we were invited, or whether there was space.
It would have been an adventure for me,
but probably a terrible stress for the adults.
We drove on toward Boston, probably all the way to Boston.

It was, I believe, forty years ago this month, in June 1969,
that Onkel Fritz visited Konnarock for my grandfather Heinz's 70th birthday.
I was 12 years old, finishing 7th grade.
Onkel Fritz was such a nice, warm person, always a little amused,
and he liked to talk.
He was like Heinz without the sadness,
the anger and resentment, and he was less ponderous.
I remember sitting at the kitchen table, doors and windows open,
and listening to him.
I remember saying to my father, Jochen,
that I hadn't realized how nice Onkel Fritz was,
and that he said that he hadn't, either,
although Onkel Fritz had been around a lot when he was very small.
While Fritz was there,
I remember none of the tension that predictably accumulated,
like charge storing up in a capacitor,
during our quarterly visits to Konnarock.

I don't know whether it was after that visit,
or apropos something else, that I first heard about "die grosse Linie,"
and that Tante Margot didn't like my grandmother because she wasn't Jewish,
that in marrying her,
my grandfather had interrupted the Abrahamic inheritance.
At some point, someone, either Marga or Margrit,
told me that when Heinz was staying with Fritz and Margot in New York
between December 1938 and March 1939,
Margot urged him to divorce Marga.
My own hypothesis is that Marga and Margot,
the two sisters-in-law, were both very strong and determined women,
and that the family wasn't big enough for the two of them.
Marion's description of Margot as "terribly domineering"
and of the "cauldron of anger" in response to opposition
sounds eerily familiar.
Each felt that the other attempted to exclude her from the family,
Marga because she wasn't Jewish,
Margot because she wasn't interested in high culture.

Each had reason to be insecure and angry.
Marga was not Jewish. What's worse,
she was the illegitimate first child
of the proverbial tavern keeper's daughter,
from a family of peasants and tradesmen.
Erich Auras, a cousin (who died Dec. 12, 1962, as I learn at
www.kulturimpuls.org/uploads/media/Kulturimpuls_Personenliste_01.rtf )
was an anthroposophist who became an architect;
I believe that another cousin was Otto Thielemann
(http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Thielemann ),
a newspaper editor and member of the SPD who died in Dachau.
Inge, one daughter of her half-brother Walter Schwarz,
married Karlheinz Krummwiede,
a successful contractor in post-war Berlin.
On the other hand, Marga's other brother, Hans Schwarz,
lived his life in the same housing project (Siedlung)
in Nikolassee in which his parents had lived,
and Inge's sister, whose name I now do not remember, (Ursula)
slid, I believe by way of alcohol and depression, back into poverty.
Marga was born in Moabit,
which I believe was the poorest district of Berlin.
She was a self-made woman who elevated herself
from the urban working class,
finding her way into petit bourgeois society
by way of her interest in literature and music,
and to some extent art.
Before meeting Heinz,
she had been engaged to a Jewish journalist who died of tuberculosis.
She prided herself on the circumstance
that Wilhelm Furtwãngler had chosen the program
she and two friends had submitted for a concert
that he was to conduct in Braunschweig.
(Marga's relatives and associates were not all left of center.
She had also once danced at a party with Franz Seldte,
http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/biografien/SeldteFranz/index.html ,
one of the founders of the Stahlhelm,
who became Minister of Labor under Hitler.
This connection was useful in 1933,
when Heinz, who did not dance,
was accused of being a Communist.
The husband of her cousin Berta Kuttroff (Tanta Bertchen)
died as an officer of the Waffen SS.
Margrit, after a visit to Bertchen in Garmisch-Partenkirchen,
described to me the full-length portrait of him in uniform,
although in later years, she forgot that,
and denied heatedly that it was possible.)

I know nothing of Margot's origins.
It is my impression that she was the daughter of a merchant,
and perhaps a successful one, from Leipzig.
I wonder whether her family was very observant,
and whether non-Jewish German culture was alien to her;
perhaps she grew up in a very traditional household,
in which learning was for the men.
Considering the prestige associated with culture
in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany,
as well as the importance of books and learning in Jewish tradition,
I wonder whether Marga may have been particularly threatening.

Georg Meyer's father was Max,
a (or the?) village physician in Oerlinghausen.
Max and Joe(l) had at least one sibling, a sister, Theodora.
Theodora's grandson is Hajo Meyer,
who survived Auschwitz to become a physicist in Holland,
latterly a violin maker,
and finally an essayist and publisher
(http://www.bookmasters.com/marktplc/02104judaism.htm ).
In the introduction to his book ?The End of Judaism:
an Ethical Tradition Betrayed?, Hajo Meyer describes
(http://www.spiritualtraveler.com/sample_chapters/EOJ_Introduction.pdf )
the family milieu. I quote at length,
because I think that it is relevant to Margot's
and Georg Meyer's frame of reference.
(I infer from Marion's account that in this country,
Georg anglicized his name,
and that he would have scorned my unwillingness to refer to him as George.
My grandparents always referred to him as Georg.
I think that they were much more resistant to Americanization,
than either Fritz or Georg.)

?My paternal grandmother, Theodora, was the paradigm
of a young Jewish woman of the type that emerged
from the so-called court Jews and protected Jews
in her case, from the small principality of Lippe-Detmold.
Such Jewish women were generally very well educated.
They were versed in the literature of the classical German writers,
as well as those of classical antiquity,
and the most successful of them held salons in their homes in Berlin.
My grandmother never did that,
but she read her Greek and Latin authors in the original.
In addition, in contrast to my maternal grandmother,
she was a warm and sensitive woman
who cared for her family of seven children
with much love on a short budget.
My father worshiped her his entire life,
and this may have something to do
with the love and attention with which he showered my mother.
One of my grandmother?s brothers,
Dr. Max Meyer, was the village physician in Oerlinghausen,
twelve kilometers from Bielefeld.

My father had four brothers and two sisters.
In contrast to the custom in my mother?s family,
all of the children?including the girls?were encouraged to study,
but with the proviso that they graduate from the Gymnasium
without failing even once.
In addition to my father,
another brother and the youngest sister met these stringent requirements.
Accordingly, that daughter was also a permitted to attend university.
However, because the parents couldn?t finance studies for three children,
they had to scrape together the necessary money themselves.
My father borrowed it from a well-to-do physician named Dr. Joseph,
one of the pioneers of plastic surgery, who had married into the family.

Unfortunately, I never knew my father?s mother.
She died relatively young from worry and heartache
over the fate of her five sons,
who were all sent to the front during World War I.
Her youngest (and favorite) son was killed during the first few weeks.
But that did not mean that my father?s family,
like almost all German Jewish families, was not extremely patriotic.

Almost all German-Jewish families, and certainly mine,
held Bildung, or general education, in particularly high regard.
We were supposed to know about antiquity, German classicism,
music, theater, and opera.
?Don?t you know that? That?s a part of a general education!?
was a comment we heard frequently at home.
We were expected to know a lot, learn a lot,
and care about two things in life:
to get a good position
so that we could contribute something valuable to society;
and most importantly,
to try to become and remain decent people
with moral principles and an active conscience.

Judaism in my Family

The way in which Judaism was practiced in my parents? house
requires some explanation.
Neither of my grandparents? families was still traditional let alone orthodox.
True, we knew which foods were kosher or treife (non-kosher),
but as a child I knew absolutely no one who observed the Jewish dietary laws.
It should be noted that Westphalia was the cradle of German Reform Judaism,
a liberal movement whose aim was to reform Jewish religious services.
No one in the Bielefeld synagogue wore a tallit, or prayer shawl.
Only the rabbi wore a rudimentary, stylized shawl
that was as wide as a woolen scarf.
If someone did come into the synagogue wearing a tallit,
which happened now and again, we?d whisper to one other,
?Hey look, he?s from Eastern Europe.?
Every once in a while we actually went to synagogue,
but mainly on high holy days.
Going to synagogue primarily served a social function.
My father, as a well-known lawyer in a mid-sized city,
and a member of a very small Jewish community
consisting of two- to three-hundred families,
could not afford not to make such appearances with his family now and then.
Halacha, the Jewish religious law, meant nothing to our family.
Ethics, achievement, and dedication?that was the important thing.
In addition, we took pride in having survived as a people since antiquity,
and in having achieved so much as German Jews,
particularly since the time of Moses Mendelssohn,
when Jews had still been primarily traders and moneylenders.?


This account suggests to me that Heinz and Marga
were very much in the mainstream of a family tradition,
and that Georg's anti-intellectual scorn
may have been the exception rather than the rule.
Marga felt very much welcomed into the family.
She told me how she and my grandfather
walked down the main street of Oerlinghausen to their civil wedding,
arms linked, Joe(l) on one side, Fritz on the other.
Her father-in-law, she said, expressed his open-mindedness with the comment,
in his more observant wife's presence,
that ?Ich habe selbst ein Christenkind fast geheiratet.?

With respect to Joe(l) Meyer,
I have two textual emendations to Jochen's account.
First, I heard the story about the Herzog von Detmold differently:
it was not a tuxedo that the Chamberlain expected, but top hat and tails.
I remember the phrase ?Zylinder und Morgenrock?,
and remember contemplating the image of a top hat being sent through the mail.
More importantly, I remember an ecumenically anticlerical version
of that brutal remark about the lampposts:
that there were not enough lampposts to hang all the priests and rabbis.
It is an important difference:
I always interpreted this remark
as an angrier version of Heine's observation about common humanity in Romanzero:

»Welcher Recht hat, weiß ich nicht -
Doch es will mich schier bedünken,
Daß der Rabbi und der Mönch,
Daß sie alle beide stinken.«


I am not sure that Joe(l) was as far to the left as Jochen surmises.
Whereas August Doering, who repaired Singer sewing machines,
was a Social Democrat,
Heinz told me that in Germany he had always voted for the DDP
(http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Demokratische_Partei).
His father, I believe he told me, was more conservative;
I think that he may have voted for the Deutsche Volkspartei
(http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Volkspartei).

Looking back at Marga, Margot, Heinz and Fritz,
I am skeptical of Jochen's description of Elfriede Meyer, nee Rosenthal,
as spending her life subservient to her husband.
I suspect rather that she was probably more like Marga and Margot,
and wonder whether the little jokes which have come down to us from Joe(l)
may not have represented his subversion of her authority.
(At the Passover Seder:
?Nein, dieses Jahr hier, naechstes Jahr auch hier.)
But who knows. They left, as far as I know,
no letters or other written records
from which we might infer who they were.
I would be interested to learn what Fritz said about the home.
In this regard, as in so many others, I never asked my grandfather enough.