Dear Daddy,

I would be interested to see the ungarbled version. Even garbled, it is very elegant. There has never been any doubt in my mind as to the logic of your arguments or the rightness of your position. As to the spiritual and emotional experience, I cannot escape the thought that the important trauma of your life did not occur on Nantucket between 2007 and 2018, but in Germany in the 1930s and to a much lesser extent in this country, culminating with the internship. The rest of your life, it seems to me, has in many ways represented an attempt to recover from that injury, and to protect yourself against further injury. A corollary of this interpretation is that your reactions to the  Damascus, Eye and Ear Infirmary and Nantucket authorities represented not only a response to their malfeasance, but to the society and authorities whose victim you were as a child. (I specifically except the Board of American Missions.) There is obviously much more to be said here. 

You once said to me that you had underestimated the trauma of the emigration for your parents, and that you had come to understand it only after reading their letters after they were dead. Without any criticism, and with great affection, I have to say that I think that the fact that you doubted the magnitude of the injury they suffered probably represented your attempt to deny your own injury. 

I understand that your life experience has been more than a response to an assault by the National Socialists. You are an extraordinarily sensitive person. We think that both of your parents had been emotionally abused as children, and although they obviously tried very hard to give Margrit and you lives different from what they had experienced, they obviously had their limitations. Much of the childhood suffering of which I have heard was apolitical, to misuse the term: your mother’s absence when you were an infant, the beating by Onkel Max, your terror in response to the fairy tales read in pre-school or kindergarten, the weeks on Juist.

Love,

Klemens

On Wed, May 4, 2022 at 12:34 AM Ernst Meyer <ernstmeyer@earthlink.net> wrote:

    Good night. I read the .odt file which I sent to you and was startled by
    how garbled it became. Not so the file which I printed out for the
    Court. I selected the wrong one of many drafts to put on my website.
    Not tonight, but when I am in the mood, I will correct the error.
    Sleep well. I hope that you are well. Thank you for coming over.

-- 
Klemens Meyer KlemensBMeyer@gmail.com Mobile 617-549-5539