Dear Cyndy,

Thank you for your letter. First things first. Happy Birthday!
albeit belatedly. Next things next: Margaret and I would love
to have you (and of course Ned) visit us any time, and if it
takes a Harvard graduation to bring you here, then Hurray! for
Harvard graduations. Please let us know the dates.  From your
letter, I infer the year to be 2013, rather than 2012.  Please
correct me if I misunderstood. Whatever the date, much will
unavoidably transpire between now and then. I suspect we all
share the sense of vulnerability that is implicit in old age.

Two days ago, our mail box held a black edged post-card size
envelope from Germany such as are conventional there for 
announcements of death. My childhood friend Helmut Frielinghaus
died of cancer on January 29. He was 81 years old. He lived in
Hamburg where he had good medical and nursing care. For the 
last two years of his life, I was his shadow physician. He
understood clearly what awaited him. He wrote me very explicitly
that he was afraid of pain, but that he was not afraid of dying.
In the final two weeks he was medicated so heavily that he could
no longer work.

Helmut had wanted to become a publisher, but was unsuccessful in
that endeavor. He resigned himself to translating into German
the works of American authors, specifically William Faulkner, John
Updike, and Raymond Carver. He was also an editor, most notably
for Guenter Grass, the most prominent modern German author, who
published last week a moving eulogy in the form of a poem. I'll
e-mail you the URL. Even though the German won't mean much, 
there's a very good picture of Helmut at a desk with Grass.
Helmut is the white-haired man on the right.

Helmut was the youngest of three sons and the third of five
children of the Pastor of the Reformed Church of which my mother
had been a member. He was 6 months younger than I. We played
together. Helmut reminded me that he was especially impressed
by my electric trains.  Characteristically, it was my sister
Margrit who re-established contact with the Frielinghaus family.
She visited Helmut in 1957 in Madrid where he was working in
a German bookstore. - His parents did not have the money to send
him to the university. Helmut and I did not meet again until
1995 when he visited us in Konnarock for a few days. Thereafter
he would spend a day with us in Belmont on the three or four
occasions when he visited Boston for professional reasons.
We would drive out to the Great Meadows Wildlife Refuge in
Concord or pay our respects to Emerson and Hawthorne in Sleepy
Hollow Cemetery.  Helmut's last visit was on December 15, 2010,
when he asked me to show him Nantucket. We were on the Island
only for five hours, but Helmut was much impressed by the
unfinished house on the moors. He was unreservedly critical of
the Nantucket authorities who caused me such trouble. We
referred to them as "Mini-Nazis".

The pivot of our relationship was Helmut's rejection of my writing.
He acknowledged my literary skills, but judged that both the
content and style of my writing, molded as it was by "classical"
German literature was woefully out of season, and would find neither
readers nor a publisher. He urged me to write about my family, about
our emigration from Germany, our life in the U.S. Such accounts, he
said would be well received, and he offered to help me. I was
stubborn and would not take his advice. I was ashamed to dramatize
and to document the family anxieties, the family quarrels, the 
multidimensional family problems which I understood only too well.
I was even more ashamed to turn myself into a propagandistic
journalist and cosmetician who would sweep the existential crises
under the rug in order to write a feel-good book that would sell.

Here's what Helmut wrote in a letter dated Feb 11, 2010
to Renate Haertle, the high school teacher supervising the
class which placed the brass "stumblingstones" into the sidewalks
in front of the houses where we once lived: (translation below)

"Ich bewundere den Edelmut, wie wir früher gesagt hätten,
die hochherzige Haltung, die Jochen gegenüber der Vergangenheit
und Gegenwart Deutschlands einnimmt. Es ist dies seit eh und
je seine Haltung, nicht etwa nur in den Briefen an Sie und Ihre
Schüler. Und noch ein Hinweis zu seinen Briefen: Jochen ist seiner
(geliebten) deutschen Sprache treu geblieben. Er ist - ich kann
das beurteilen als jemand, der ein Leben lang als Verlags-Lektor
gearbeitet hat und heute noch freiberuflich als Lektor und Übersetzer
arbeitet, zum Beispiel als Lektor von Günter Grass - ein Schriftsteller.
Seine Sprache ist genährt von der Sprache dessen, was wir einst
deutschen Geist nennen durften, von der Sprache der großen deutschen
Dichter - ich erwähne hier als beispielhaft Goethe, Hölderlin,
Kleist, Rilke. Das Seltsame, das, was an ein Wunder grenzt, ist,
dass er nicht nur die Liebe zur deutschen Sprache, sondern auch
die Kenntnis der deutschen Sprache und der großen deutschen Literatur
seinem Sohn Klemens "weitergeben" konnte. (Klemens hat über Kleist
gearbeitet.) Irgendwann werde ich formulieren können, dass die
Vertreibung bei Jochen in gewisser Weise, innerlich,  immer fortgewirkt
hat. Als das fortgewirkt hat, was wir in den sechziger und siebziger
Jahren großspurig Entfremdung genannt haben, ohne zu wissen,
was wirkliche Entfremdung ist.  Meine Sprache ist der Gegenwart
verhaftet, ist mit den deutschen Entwicklungen in Politik, Literatur
und Kultur gröber geworden." 

(translation of the above:)
I admire the generosity, as we would once have said,
the magnanimous disposition which Jochen entertains
toward Germany's past and present. This has always been
his attitude, not only in his letters to you and to your
students. An yet another remark about his letters: 
Jochen has remained faithful to his (beloved) German
language. Inasmuch as I have spent my life as editor
for publishing houses, and to this day work as a translator
and as a freelance editor, for example for Guenter Grass,
I am qualified to make the judgment that Jochen is an author.
His language is nourished by the language to which in times
past we were permitted to refer as the language of the
German spirit - I mention as examples Goethe, Hoelderlin,
Kleist, Rilke. Remarkable and almost miraculous is that
he was able to "pass on" not only his love of the language
but also his knowledge of the language and of the great
German literature, to his son Klemens. (Klemens wrote about
Kleist.) Some day I will be able to articulate that in a
certain manner banishment has continued to affect Jochen
inwardly, in a way to which in the decades of the sixties
and seventies we flamboyantly referred as alienation without
knowing what real alienation is.  My language is attuned to
the present and in consonance with German developments in
politics, literature and culture, has become more coarse.

So much for the translated quotation from my friend Helmut.
I have always been grateful to him for his candor in
telling me that my writing has no potential readership.
Helmut helped me to overcome what Milton called that last
infirmity of noble mind, and made it possible me to find a
(spiritual) space where I can be creative, productive and
happy. What more could I want?

You challenge my prediction that you won't like my writing.
Our correspondence of 2308 days, about 6 years and 4 months
has given me an idea of what interests you and what doesn't.
You've been very gracious about accepting the fact that I
write only what is on my mind, not everything, but almost
everything; and that I won't censor myself. It wouldn't
embarrass or offend me, if you happened to like some of the
imagery or reasoning that I send your way. But take a cue
from Helmut. Agreement to disagree is of a higher order.
When I write that it's better to wrestle with the angel
than to have a beer together, I'm implying not that you're
an angel or that I'm an angel; just that the dialectical
relationship is by far the most authentic agreement.

My best to Ned and to yourself. I look forward some day
to seeing you again in Belmont. Why not make it a habit
to graduate every year?

Jochen