December 21, 2021

Well Jochen: As always, you write beautifully describing your musings.  By themselves, they serve as a window into your Psyche.  Sadly, your reflections on the past presents a somewhat dark portrayal, evidenced by the sad end to each of the sister Rosenthals. Frankly, I found your presentation in and of itself a rare insightful review of their past.  Your description of their “escaping” into marriage (from their parents or family), in itself, presents a picture of their family as anything but a place of welcome, or am I reading too much into your phrasing? Certainly, to read Dr. Busch’s book, one comes away with many thoughts of very sad incidents and personalities.  Yet, all is not sad when one reads of the great achievements of most of their offspring, you included. The book is filled with stories of heroism, sacrifice and successes both in careers, in life, and relationships. Just looking at the population (descendants today), one cannot but be impressed with their occupations. Of course, that does not denote current or future success, happiness, or quality of lifestyle. 

As to my feeling a sense of pride, I can only point to a few examples of what I learned through my own experiences in meeting “newfound relatives” in my travels. I have briefly met relatives in Chile, Argentina, and Britain and found them all exceptionally bright, hospitable, energetic and quite fascinating (you included)!  In addition,  I have come to exchange communications with others in Israel, who again, were quite lovely, and quite worldly. This is not to say that there aren’t exceptions, whom haven’t been made known to me. I just completed the reading of The Photographer of Auschwitz.  One could not find a more sad, disconcerting portrayal of a hell on earth, yet there were moments described that showed how determined individuals could rise above the worst of circumstances. Bottom line, the sheer fact that our shared Rosenthal family has not only persevered and endured, but has done so with many records of achievement, thus I can’t see how one could not be proud of our family.  As a final note, I would be happy to fill you in on some facts (not myths) that I encountered in researching our ancestry. 

Jan and I will be going to Florida to spend time with our immediate family of 15 for 2 weeks.  Our children and grandchildren will be flying in from Boston, San Jose CA and Chicago. I will be taking many books along and hope to read, relax and enjoy family time together. I look forward to more exchanges with you. All the best for a nice holiday period and a safe, healthy new year.  Fondly, Don

> On Dec 16, 2021, at 5:12 PM, Ernst Meyer <ernstmeyer@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> December 15, 2021
>
> Dear Donald,
>
> Thank you for your letter. Sixty-five years ago when I was a general practitioner, a country doctor, in Southwest Virginia, I regularly visited at home, patients too ill to come to my office, and when for some reason I was delayed, many a patient would tell me with a mixture of reproach and relief when I finally arrived: "Doctor, I'm glad you are here. I almost gave you out of coming." When yesterday, your e-mail appeared in my "Inbox", I silently addressed you in a similar vein: "I'm glad to have another letter from you, I almost gave you out of writing."
>
> Not that I was impatient. Some of my correspondents answer my letters as infrequently as once a year. To the extent that I was troubled, it was from concern that my account in Chapter Seven of Albert, the hermit who had tried to escape the Holocaust, not as a potential victim but as a potential perpetrator, by fleeing into the ruins of the abandoned mining village Bankhead in the Canadian Rockies.  He found himself unable to separate the world into two camps, into the "good guys" opposing the "bad guys", and felt compelled to remind himself by wearing the uniform of an SS-Sturmbannführer, that somewhere, deep in his soul, he found vestiges which persuaded him, that he too "could have been such a one."
>
> These ruminations seem to me relevant to the topic on which you would like to spend more time, "our shared ancestry and how our individual knowledge of such could expand our knowledge of our family ties." You further write: "The more that I find and learn about, the more impressed (and proud) I become with that history." I share your interest in understanding the past and if I join you in trying to understand what it means to be "proud" of ones family I ask you not to be angry or offended if I balance the attempt to try to understand what it means to be proud, with my own private endeavor to try to understand what it means to be ashamed.
>
> Whenever I reflect on "history" of any kind, I am reminded how absolutely inaccessible I find, - or rather, fail to find - the past. I can't even remember at what time I went to bed last night, whether I turned off the light and the stove in the kitchen. I can't remember at all what happened last week, not to speak of what happened a year ago, what happened in my youth or my childhood. Given the circumstances that I can't recapitulate what I myself experienced, it seems incongruous to presume that I, - or anyone else - should be capable of even a tentative reconstruction of the past, whether it be with the aids of verbal tradition, of written records, of graphic representations, blueprints, drawings or paintings, photographs, with motion pictures or other audio-video records. I conclude that all such reproductions of what might once have been experienced as real, are tools of which I avail myself to fashion not new realities, but fictions or myths, stories that, as I repeat them over and over again, assume control of my mind, becoming progressively more persuasive, until ultimately I am forced by society to adopt their fictitious reality, on pain of otherwise being denounced as culturally subversive if not indeed insane.
>
> Credit for the elaboration of mythical models of ultimate chronological remoteness (and hence absurdity) must go to the astrophysicists who have replaced Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth," with the Big Bang theory as "the prevailing cosmological model explaining the existence of the observable universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution. The model describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature, and offers a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and large-scale structure."
>
> "Crucially, the theory is compatible with Hubble–Lemaître law—the observation that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away from Earth. Extrapolating this cosmic expansion backwards in time using the known laws of physics, the theory describes an increasingly concentrated cosmos preceded by a singularity in which space and time lose meaning (typically named "the Big Bang singularity"). Detailed measurements of the expansion rate of the universe place the Big Bang singularity at around 13.8 billion years ago, which is thus considered the age of the universe." (Wikipedia)?
>
> It is against the background of mythical history, scientific "modeling" based on the "laws" of physics, or poetic literary compositions of archetypes such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, that I contemplate the implementation of your wish to learn more about "our family's history." Dr. Busch's point of departure, "Verstreut über alle fünf Kontinente," was to identify us Rosenthals, although we never lived together, and although in many instances we never knew each other, as an "extended family", merely because we were descended from two common ancestors, Jakob and Isaak Rosenthal. Dr. Busch arbitrarily excluded from our "family", the siblings of Jakob and Isaak and their numerous descendants, lest the size of the "Großfamilie," (grand-family) should become conceptually unmanageable for him. There ensued a potpourri, a patchwork of voluntary, unreviewed, uncorroborated contributions which varied widely, from expansive semi-poetic effusions, such as my own, to the mere recitation of names of persons, parents, spouses and children, dates of birth and death, and perhaps, places of residence, leaving any implementation of the framework of existence to the haphazard imaginings of the reader.
>
> While Dr. Busch's project required him to focus on the unity of our Rosenthal family and to ignore the families with which individual Rosenthalers allied themselves, my experience and hence my perspective is converse. I observe the almost irresistable centrifugal forces that dissolve our families and separate family members from each other. In consequence of this experience many a one of us is afflicted with an almost painful yearning for home. In his novel "Heinrich von Ofterdingen" the romantic poet Novalis poses the question: "But where are we going?" (Wo gehn wir denn hin?) and suggests the answer: "We are forever going home" (immer nach Hause). That, as I understand it, is the basis of your own passionate interest in, and your need to be proud of, of the Rosenthal family; and that, as I understand it, was what motivated Dr. Busch to compose his idealized portrait of a family of which, in secret, he wanted to be a member.
>
> When I contemplate the Rosenthal family I think primarily of Jakob's three daughters, Antonie, Johanna and Elfriede, one of whom, Johanna escaped into marriage with Sigmund Hesse, who became by far the wealthiest member of the family; but Johanna died in 1919 at an early age, of cancer, and three years later, Sigmund replaced her with Claire Stock; while Antonie escaped the Rosenthals by marrying Gustav Meyer in Bielefeld and Elfriede escaped by marrying Joe Meyer in Oerlinghausen. The lives into which they escaped were anything but blissful.  Antonie, widowed for many years, offered her home in nearby Kartenhausen as refuge for other family members fleeing from the Nazis, then died by suicide while herself being transported to Auschwitz.  Elfriede had to see all three of her sons volunteer for the First World War, and lost the eldest and dearest to her, Ernst Joachim, when he was killed at only age 18, on the Loretto Heights near Souchez in Normandy. Elfriede survived her husband Joe for 3 years.  After a hard life and a brief illness, she died of natural causes in 1934 in Braunschweig.  The stories of the three Rosenthal sisters bring to mind lines from "The Traveller" (1764), a poem by Oliver Goldsmith:
>
> "How small, of all that human hearts endure,
> That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!
>
> I ask myself, and I ask you: Is that true?
>
> What little I know about the Rosenthal family stems from the efforts of Dr.  Busch. What little I know about the Meyer family is derived from the few stories my father told me and from a small collection of letters dating back as far as about 1800, when one Heine Herz, dissatisfied with what seemed to him the indignity of his name, changed it to Heine Herzberg. My reflections on both families engender not pride, but sorrow, pity for their existences, impoverished it seems to me, not only economically but also spiritually, sadness not only because time with its passage has taken them away, but perhaps more poignant, because even if we were contemporaries, we would find ourselves to be human beings so different that there could be no understanding, and hence no help between us.
>
> My very best mid-winter wishes to yourself and Jan.
>
> Jochen