Dear Marion,

As I reread your letter which my computer has stamped
07-03-09 12:12 a.m., I am struck with the incisiveness
of your questions. You get to the point, you would have
become a good psychiatrist or a good prosecutor, - although
to my mind prosecutors can never truly be good. I think
their minds are afflicted with a pathetic congenital defect.

You ask about humor, my family's and my own. I think humor
is not something that can be learned, not something that's
acquired by assimilation (homoiosis).  Humor is an inborn
disposition, a defense mechanism which makes it possible to
come to terms with some of the incongruities of existence.
The term humor is widely inclusive, and is in fact rather
ambiguous.  What some find humorous (funny), to others seems
shallow, frivolous, nonsensical or just plain foolish. 
Humor often implies criticism and may be construed as
destructive or negativistic. Goethe's Mephistopheles, a
paradigm of humor, said: Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint.
To the believer, humor directed at religion may be highly
offensive as being blasphemous.

The description of Heinz, Marga and their children as being
devoid of humor, lugubrious and aching with Weltschmerz is a
caricature which was probably useful to Fritz and Margot in
explaining or justifying their rejection of us. It's more
complex than that. I'm beginning to suspect that humor, or lack
thereof, may have been a legacy issue in the Meyer family.
I remember vividly hearing my mother say to my father on
numerous occasions: "Ach, Paps, Du hast ja gar keinen Humor,
lach' doch einmal." and then she would tickle him to get him
to laugh. Frequently her playfulness was contagious and he
would reciprocate the light-heartness. Occasionally he felt
humiliated, his dignity impugned, and then he became surly.
The nickname "Paps", I believe, was an import from a Danish
author Karen Michaelis, who wrote a series of sophisticated
childrens' books about a girl named Bibi, who was the product
of a mesalliance between a railroad station master and a young
countess (Komtesse), whose aristocratic grandparents finally
accepted her only after their daughter had died. Both my
parents read to us the Bibi books which were suffused with
humor, and seemed to enjoy them even more than did my sister
and I. And, of course, if "Paps" was the plebeian station
master, his wife had been the Komtesse of noble lineage.
It figures.  The nickname, with which my mother baptized
my father as early as 1936, stuck for the rest of his life.
Incidentally, it was only she who called him "Paps", Margrit
and I never did.

My mother's sense of humor was literary. She like to quote
nonsense verse from Christian Morgenstern's Galgenlieder:

Die Möwen sehen alle aus,
als ob sie Emma hießen.
Sie tragen einen weißen Flaus
und sind mit Schrot zu schießen.

Ich schieße keine Möwe tot,
ich laß sie lieber leben -
und füttre sie mit Roggenbrot
und rötlichen Zibeben.

O Mensch, du wirst nie nebenbei
der Möwe Flug erreichen.
Wofern du Emma heißest, sei
zufrieden, ihr zu gleichen.

Christian Morgenstern, 1871-1914

She classified her neighbors and acquaintances
whom she deemed to be driven by amoral instinct
as characters typical of Hamsun; those whose lives
she found expressive of social graces or lack thereof,
reminded her, she said, of the novels of Hermann Bang.

Various members of the mission staff, and on occasion
some of their remarkable patients, were tagged by my
parents with humorous and often satirical pseudonyms,
which were used consistently within the family, but
never disclosed to the victims.

Thus the NYC based church official responsible for Konnarock,
one Rev. Paul Andrew Kirsch, D.D., was called
"der grosse Bruder", - it was a pre-Orwell designation, -
because he had nepotistically installed his younger brother,
Fred Kirsch, whom they christened "Der kleine Bruder,"
as Mission Superintendent.  Der kleine Bruder was not
effective at all, proved an embarrassment to Der grosse
Bruder, who replaced him in 1940, a year after our arrival,
with one Rev. Able Kenneth Hewitt, who was more of an
executive and a mildly charismatic showman and promoter.
Him my parents dubbed, Der Fuehrer.  A nurse deaconess,
named Sophia Moeller, assigned to the Mission, and once
mentioned in a promotional pamphlet as an angel of mercy,
was thereafter referred to as "Der Engel."  A young and
very personable factotum named Tom Blevins, received the
epithet "Aquino", - I always thought rather flightily, -
because my parents liked the sound of the word;
their only knowledge of Saint Thomas was from Heine:

Thomas von Aquino sagt es,
Den man nennt den großen Ochsen
Der Gelehrsamkeit, er ist
Licht und Lust der Orthodoxen. 

The nickname was non-sensical, but so far as my parents
were concerned, it was permanent. In 1946, I showed my parents
an essay that I had written for a college composition course,
in which I described a scene in the village store and suggested
a certain similarity between the proprietor, T. L. Waters and
a vulture preying on impoverished and helpless victims.
Thereafter they referred to T.L. almost exclusively as Der Geier.
Whether all this is humor, and to what extent, if at all, it
serves to exonerate my parents from the charge of lugubriousness
and Weltschmerz is another matter.

That will need to be enough for this morning. I have
to get to work.

Jochen