NOT SENT
February 20, 2022
Dear Nikola,
This is the continuation of my recent letter which I promised, or with which I threatened you. In writing to you now, I avail myself of the opportunity, as has become a habit with me in almost all of my recent letters, critically to review and to report the most recent excursions of my mind, peregrinations which have become so desultory that I am at loss to determine the point where I should begin my report.  

What comes to mind is the word "Wendenwehr", associated with the city, Braunschweig, which was my home for the first 8 years and 248 days of my life.  For 87 years the word "Wendenwehr" has tumbled in my mind without a conclusive definition, and only today have I discovered with the help of Grimms Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache its conventional meaning. "Wehr" is an ambiguous term commonly synonymous with "defense". Thus the army of the contemporary German state is called "die Bundeswehr" (the Federal Defense Force) Prior to 1945, the German army's official name was Reichswehr (Imperial Defense Force).  A cognate meaning and widely relied upon meaning of "Wehr" is a dam or other barrier which obstructs - and perhaps "defends" against - the flow of water in the river. I haven't been able to ascertain whether one of the two meanings of "Wehr" is derived from the other, or whether they have separate sources in the mysterious social origins of language which on occasion fortuitously converge in a single word. So far as the Wendenwehr is concerned, it is a dam in one of the semicircles into which the stream, "die Oker", was devided in the Middle Ages. "Das Wendenwehr" is reported to have been built in 1821 to regulate the waterlevel in the eastern semicircle of the municipal moat which had protected the inner city from real or hypothetical invaders since the 13th or 14th century. How this waterlevel was controlled, or why it did not need control prior to 1821 is a mystery to me.

 The first part of the name Wendenwehr is also adumbrated with some uncertainty.  There is just north-northwest of Braunschweig a small community dating also to the middle ages, with the name Wenden which arose from local dialect and is said to be unrelated to the name Wenden which was at times past a synomym for Slavs, who were foreigners and thus presumptive enemies. Accordingly the proximate and plausible etymology of Wendenwehr as defense against the Slavs is incorrect, but demonstrates the misleading subtleties of language. 

Attached is an enlarged satellite image of Wendenwehr and its surroundings.  The wide vertical gray stripe in the center of this image is a braod street traversed by Streetcar #1 and called Wendenstraße, presumably because it leads in the direction of Wenden. In the upper right (north-eastern) portion of this satellite image is at right angles to Wendenstraße, extending to the east, a street which is very straight, and labeled as Schleinitzstraße. On the north east corner of Schleinitz- and Wendenstraße appears as a vertically elongated rectangle parallel to Wendenstraße, an apartment house, which has the address, Schleinitzstraße 1. This is a building similar in size and shape to an apartment house on the second floor of which I lived with my family from January 9, 1934 to March 3, 1939.  The original structure was totally demolished in the airraid of October 14, 1944, which destroyed 90 percent of the Medieval-Renaissance city. In the sidewalk adjacent to the entrance of Schleintzstraße 1 are "Stolpersteine" commemorating the exodus of my family and myself.

The northern end of the Wendenwehr abuts a small city park named after the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauß, as is the low hill in its center, "der Gaußberg". Gauß was born and spent the first years of his life only a few city blocks from Schleinitzstraße 1. Had we been contemporaries, we might well have found ourselves to be classmates in the same high school (Gymnasium).  I feel drawn to Gauß because of his isolation and loneliness. He refrained from publishing many of his ideas, because he felt misunderstood. His wife died; he remarried, and his second wife predeceased him. His sons were so angry that they abandoned him and moved to the United States. He was uncomfortable as a teacher. He died in the care of a daughter.