Dear Marion,

Thanks as always for your letter.
In the compulsive manner which is native to me,
I've been ruminating over my legal arguments for next Wednesday
repeating to myself over and over what I am going to tell
the three appellate judges. If don't see why you should be
interested, but if you are, you have access to my arguments
on the Web at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~jochenmeyer/litigation/litig_index.html
The letter listed as No. 7 in my index, but #8 on the docket sheet,
sums it all up. As I review the case, I find that I have most
thoroughly torn up the floor boards. I see now that the case
is so riddled with grave governmental error: with fabrication of
evidence, forgery and concealment of evidence on the part of
Nantucket; with violation of procedural rules and fabrication of evidence
on the part of the Board of State Examiners of Plumbers, and on the
part of the Attorney General, with certification of a false legal record,
concession of the case by failing to oppose the motion for judgment
on the pleadings and excusing this failure by claiming status as a
nominal party: - it's all so illogical, absurd and illegal that the
appeals court judges won't want any of it, and will sweep it all 
under the rug by affirming, without comment, the judgment of the
court below. C'est la vie.

I was wrong in saying we should write no more about Margrit. I believe
you should be free to write to me whatever is on your mind that you would
like to express. I may or may not respond to what you write. My own
meditations have led me to the conclusion that all criticism is egotistic;
that my inter vivos criticism has the implicit purpose of persuading my
target to do or to become what I want.  By that token, post mortem
criticism is unavoidably tinged with despair on account of the
impossibility of its achieving its purpose, and that's why one is
so reluctant to say anything but good of the dead. 

These considerations, it seems to me are quite apposite to the vivid
account that you give of "Das weisse Band", no less than to "Das siebte
Kapitel" or for that matter, to all accounts of wrong or crime or
suffering in the past. Such descriptions are compelling only to the
extent that we are able to conceive of them as being present,
in the present, "gegenwaertig," where they are capable of modifying
current behavior.  There comes a juncture at which that which has
been perceived as present, as contemporary, loses its force and slips
into the past where we become indifferent to it. Who still lies awake
in agony reflecting on the cruelty of the Thirty Years War? - or the
Inquisition, not to speak of all the genocides so blithely chronicled
in the Bible, or the suffering of those poor souls who were drowned
in the Great Flood which only Noah and his family survived?

These considerations, it seems to me, shed a new light on current
controversies about the denial of the Holocaust. Isn't denial of the
horrors of the past the rule rather than the exception? I'm also
reminded of Kierkegaard's fervent insistence on spiritual Samtidighed
(contemporaneity, Gleichzeitigkeit) with Jesus as the precondition
of true (existential) Christianity. All in all, the transformation
of morality as the present lapses into the past is an intersting
topic in the "philosophy of history", which is potentially productive
of more than one full professorship.

Jochen