December 22, 2021

Dear Donald,

Thank you for your prompt reply. Please don't construe the circumstance that I answer almost by return e-mail as reflecting my wish or need for anything more than a leisurely exchange of letters at whatever frequency is congenial to you.  What you tell me, gives me to think; each thought demands to be reduced to writing.  A diary entry would be subject to indefinitely continuing review and revision. The draft of a letter has the advantage of closure: once sent, it acquires a finality of its own which frees the mind for new adventures.

I don't remember in which of his dialogues, Plato cautions the student to be wary of even as much as listening to the Sophist, arguing that the mind is defenseless against poisonous ideas which it assimilates as eagerly as it absorbs healthy ideas. Unlike food, thoughts can't be tested for safety by trying them on the cat. Plato's imperative alarms me as dictatorial and authoritarian. I prefer the motto from one of the comedies written by Terence: Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. (I am a man: I consider nothing human alien to me.) Nonetheless, in the context of our Rosenthal family, I caution you about the hazards of paying attention to what I report about about my thoughts and about my feelings.

My mother was a poet. She did not write anything, but she loved to tell stories; and one of her favorite stories served to demonstrate my idiosyncracies as an infant. She told it over and over again. In 1931, my mother had persuaded my father to a trip in their new bright red Ford Phaeton automobile which was, so I am told, for a few weeks the most prestigious automobile in the city.  They would criss-cross the Germany which was their home and which they loved.  She enlisted her mother-in-law Elfriede née Rosenthal to baby-sit the two young children. My sister Margrit was three years of age and I was one year old. The thirty-two year old successful physician and his thirty-three year old wife set off to drive from Braunschweig to Naumburg, to Würzburg, up the valley of the Tauber to Rothenburg, thence to Dinkelsbühl in Bavaria, then northwest to Speyer, Worms and Mainz, across the Main to Wiesbaden and Assmannshausen on the Rhine, where they stayed in the Hotel Krone before driving back to Braunschweig.

They had been away for a month. My mother, who had an instinct for drama, recounts the scene. As the travelers came through the door, Elfriede declared: "Marga, I'm so relieved that you're back. I am completely exhausted. The girl was no problem, but the boy cried and shrieked interminably, day and night, without letting up. I couldn't stand it any longer. I am exhausted." I heard this story so often that I couldn't forget it, but it took me sixty years or more to figure out what actually went on. If an infant who is not sick, who is not cold or hungry or in pain, cries and screams, he asks and needs to be cuddled. Elfriede, a pious woman who made regular entries in her prayer book, discovered then that she had no affection or love for this little troublesome uncircumcised goy, and so she withheld her care; she would not pick him up, she would not cuddle him; she let him scream, and justified herself by placing the blame on him, complaining that it was he who had exhausted her. It took me until this evening, approximately ninety and one half years after the event, to realize that Elfriede knew exactly what she was and what she was not doing.  Else she would have had to assume that I cried because I was ill; she would have had to call the doctor or to take me to whatever hospital emergency room was accessible to her.

In reconstructing these events, I feel no resentment, no anger, no sorrow and no regrets. I have always considered myself very fortunate without the least cause for complaint. I view life alternately as comedy and as tragedy.  Thomas Mann, in his short story Tonio Kröger describes his hero as looking out at the world: "Und was er sah, war Komik und Elend." (And what he saw was humor and misery.) I don't presume to know what lasting effects, if any, that month in which my screaming exhausted my grandmother had on my life.  All I can report are "the facts" as they have become enshrined in my memory and in the myths of my past by which I now orient myself.

Until age 15, I was afflicted with separation anxiety which impaired every effort to absent myself from my parents.  I remember that as a small child, when I was unable to sleep, I was afraid of the dark, and would disturb and annoy my parents, whose bedroom was next to the children's room by calling out: "Ich bin hier so alleine." (I am so lonely here.)

Attemps to leave home were futile. The first instance, when in the summer of 1936, I was sent to a children's camp on the West-Frisian island Juist, where, to the chagrin of the camp counselors, I wept regularly if not continually for the two or three or four weeks of my stay. The second instance, from April to September 1939, after our emigration from Germany when I was farmed out to an American family, because my parents had no money for family lodgings, I described at http://73.253.255.20/div00/aw/With_the_Flanders
When we finally arrived in Virginia, the Mission Superintendent was so embarrassed or offended by my glumness that he unwittingly mocked me by saddling me with the nickname "Happy" against which I did not know how to protest. The third instance, from September 1942 to December 1942, I spent at the home of a postal clerk named Gruber - I don't remember his first name - on McCallum Street, in Mount Airy in Philadelphia while I attended 8th grade of Germantown Friends School. I was too homesick for my parents to return for the spring term of the school year and stayed in Virginia after the New Year's recess. Only in 1945, at age 15, when I re-entered Germantown Friends School in 12th grade, did I finally manage to leave home. There the music teacher, a very accomplished musician named Mary Brewer, would intersperse her directions at the chorus in which I was singing to comment on my disconsolate appearance.

At the end of that school year, a classmate with whom I remained friends until he died, at age 93, just five days ago, invited me to join his family to attend the Bach Festival in Bethlehem Pennsylvania, where I met and fell in love with his sister Margaret, who was six years older than I, and whom it took three years to discover me. Then, after we came to know each other by reading poetry together and I had introduced her to the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, she wrote to me (on March 29, 1950): "... I think I have told you how troubled I am by the negative quality of so much of Rilke. Only pain and loss and separation affirmed. Yet I have nothing more positive to say - and if I had, it would have no meaning for you. If there is any other way for you to feel, you will have to find it for yourself - or it will have to find you." Ultimately, Margaret accepted me the way I am, and decided that she did not want to be without me.

On the Internet, I found an interesting and learned discussion of the meaning of tragedy.
https://www.britannica.com/art/tragedy-literature/Theory-of-tragedy which is summarized in my mind in a line from King Lear (IV,1)
    Edgar. [aside] And worse I may be yet. The worst is not
    So long as we can say 'This is the worst.' 2280

In Numbers 21, I read:

4 And they journeyed from mount Hor by the way of the Red sea, to compass the land of Edom: and the soul of the people was much discouraged because of the way.

5 And the people spake against God, and against Moses, Wherefore have ye brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? for there is no bread, neither is there any water; and our soul loatheth this light bread.

6 And the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died.

7 Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord, and against thee; pray unto the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us. And Moses prayed for the people.

8 And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.

I explain to myself, that in these many years of writing, I have been following the instructions of Moses by describing fiery serpents, the contemplation of which has made it possible me to survive. Affection for and gratitude to my grandmother Elfriede Rosenthal for having contributed to making me the person that I am, has become the focus of my relationship to our family.

Best wishes to yourself and Jan.

Jochen