Dear Marion,

The spacious third floor eyrie, where I sit in front of the computer
in splendid isolation, gazing out into the dense foliage of maple,
wild cherry, apple and hemlock trees, has at its inner wall,
a closet where I found the ball of string with which I just now
secured two thick bundles of parental transatlantic correspondence
from 1938 and 1939, before replacing these packets in the filing cabinet
of an adjacent storage room, carefully pushing the drawer shut as if
it were the lid of Pandora's box.

Thank you for your letter. It arrived yesterday afternoon and while
I was copying and copying and copying the pages of the Record
Appendix for my appeal, I mulled over some of the questions you had
assigned to me. There are 166 pages in all, and I thought I would
be able to finish. Then, at midnight, while making the required 13
copies of page 157, the ink well (toner cartridge) went dry. Too
late to start the messy job of refilling it. I remembered vaguely
that I had placed bundles of my parents' letters in one of
the drawers of the metal filing cabinet in what we still call 
"the train room," because that's where forty or so years ago,
I set up for him, Klemens' electric trains. In the third drawer
down, I found four packets, neatly bundled, but in chronological
disorder. I opened the bundle with the return address "Heinz Meyer,
c. o. Fritz J. Meyer, 1781 Riverside Drive, - and started to read.

I didn't get to bed until 3 a.m.  It was hard going. The letters were
difficult to decipher, because the writer had obviously wanted
to save the money for a new typewriter ribbon, and the reader had
declined to spend the money for replacing a pair of badly scratched
reading glasses. But what I read was sufficient to persude me that
much of what I have recently written about my parents should be
considered, as the government press secretaries used to say "inoperative."
I don't know where to begin the process of correcting my misapprehensions.

I had previously understood that the affidavits for Marga, Margrit
and myself had been provided by Kurt Friedrichs, the mathematician
who had been my father's patient in Braunschweig. But I found no mention
of any Friedrichs' affidavit.  Rather it is Fritz, Margot, and Georg
and one of their friends to whom Margrit and I still owe thanks for
providing us with that life-saving document. At one point, Heinz makes
explicit mention of Margot's matter-of-fact businesslike cooperation
with the affidavit issuance.  Heinz also reported to his wife that he
had plenty to eat, and that his every wish was fulfilled.  

If nonetheless Heinz was desperately unhappy, that unhappiness came
from within him and from within his family. As I read fragments of
his prodigious literary output, - letters of eight single spaced 8.5 x 11
inch typewritten pages, day after day, I am again reminded of Goethe-Tasso:
Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qual verstummt, gab mir ein Gott zu sagen,
was ich leide. My father's distress seems to have been the consequence
of an accumulation of factors, the unaccustomed poverty, the unavoidable
lack of privacy, the foreignness of the language, the uncertainty about
even being admitted to the medical and language examinations, not to speak
of passing them, the unfamiliarity of the prevalent popular culture,
the potential difficulty of finding remunerative employment of any sort -
but above all and most eloquently described: the anxiety of separation
from my mother and from Margrit and myself, a distress poignantly
comparable to my own unhappiness a few months later in Chappaqua and Canaan.
Until last night, I thought separation anxiety was an affliction
only of children, and arguably my father's suffering might be construed
as evidence that he had not really grown up. It's no surprise that
Margot considered us impossible to get along with. It's true. We were.

I don't know how long it will be before I have time and can summon the
courage to resume my philological research into my family's past.
I'm much impressed how terribly fallible my memory and how in the
absence of documentary evidence, my efforts to reconstruct the past
have been almost pure fiction. But even with documentation, the past
remains inaccessible. The letters, for better or worse, become objects
of literary criticism, and even with their help, "Wie es eigentlich
gewesen" turns out to be an elusive mirage.

Why should the Darwinian account of "Wie es eigentlich gewesen" be 
less of an elusive mirage?  You ask, why I referred to Charles Darwin
as a grown-up child par excellence.  A child's memory is so tenacious
that the past is vivid and compelling to an extent that the child's 
past is hardly to be distinguished from the child's present.
One has to become an adult, one has to start losing ones memory,
one has to get old, perhaps to get very old, to understand
that the past is inaccessible.
My interest in Darwinism is epistemological. 
I cannot but interpret the descriptions of the past
that are promulgated by Darwin's disciples as a species of history,
and while as objective experience (Erfahrung) history may appear rational,
as subjective experience (Erleben), history is indistinguishable from myth.

I myself, a faithful disciple of Aesculapius, discover and rediscover
that knowledge is empirical, that knowledge recrudesces from experience
day after day and year after year, like the snowdrops and crocuses that
reappear year after year in the garden; that the only knowledge which
can be trusted is the knowledge that accrues from observation; that
knowledge derived from theories and theorizing can be catastrophically
misleading, and that facts which are not susceptible to immediate
empirical verification are theories. "Das Hoechste waere zu begreifen,
dass alles Faktische schon Theorie ist." (Goethe) 

For years now, I've been engaged in what is perhaps a quixotic effort:
to adapt the existential scepticism with which Kierkegaard rejected
the historicity of Jesus, to the academic (humanistic) and natural
sciences, to Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften. On the one hand, that's
a monumentally presumptuous effort but on the other hand its the only
cogent response to my awareness of my own ignorance. How else can I
protect myself against the demand that I profess to know what I find
intuitively to be unknowable? The goal is to be able to return with
good conscience to the starting point (Ausgangspunkt) of our
philosophical tradition: the Socratic confession that the only knowledge
of which I can be certain is my own ignorance.  
More on this subject later.

Jochen