August 8, 2022 Hello Jochen: Delaying in your response and mine as well, makes sense. As I read your last reply below, I am reminded of the term, “free thinking” or "stream of consciousness”. Your reply takes us afar from the real reason for our communications, i.e. establishing and continuing to keep family ties and updates to what appeared to be long forgotten family relationships. As it turns out, there are now strong new inter-family communications on my mother’s father’s (the Mendel’s) side. Thus, I am being introduced to new folks in England, Argentina and Israel. Also, on my father’s side to new family members; one group (Orthodox Jewish folks) formerly, egg farmers in Vineland NJ, now residing in Elizabeth New Jersey, as well as completely non-religious members (for example, a Science professor in Baltimore). And then, another branch in the movie production business in Hollywood and Los Angeles. Bottom line, it is fascinating seeing how those, who having escaped the Shoah, are building their existence in various successful occupations in so many distant locations. I often think what could have been had 6 million Jews (and many of our direct family), not perished from the Nazis! As for me, I am in the throes of major coming changes to my plans. I have just learned that my Meningioma is growing again and likely will need to be removed via major surgery. I’ll keep you informed what transpires next. In conclusion, always glad to hear from you. I might add one final thought: I have not contacted your son as you always stress how busy he is, but I fear that you not informing him of our exchanges will act as a missing link in our generation-to-generation family evolution of communications. If you can, please correct this matter. Don > Begin forwarded message: > > From: Ernst Meyer > Subject: August 3, 2022 > Date: August 2, 2022 at 11:33:02 PM CDT > To: Donald Strauss > > > July 26, 2022 > Dear Donald, > > Thank you for your letter. As I read it, I think about it, and I want to answer it right away, because of my habit of putting into writing whatever is on my mind in real time, as the computer programmers would say. And yet the virtually instantaneous exchange of letters, especially as it is nowadays facilitated by electronic mail, leads to practical impossiblity. It would leave us time for nothing else. Therefore I propose to appease Chronos, the god of time, by introducing into my reply, as is considered good engineering practice, an arbitrary but automatic delay of perhaps a week, before finally clicking the "send" button. It is a pause that provides me with an opportunity to augment, to correct, and if necessary to censure my thoughts. > > Your letter reminds me of a suggestion by Friedrich Nietzsche, that life is acrobatics and that our journeys from birth to death are transits on a high-wire from which we must take care not to plunge into uncharted depths. In my experience at least, the most effective and reliable balancing pole that makes these acrobatics possible is language, which satisfies the needs to communicate with each other and with ourselves. That is the perspective from which I interpret your letter and that is what our correspondence means to me. > > From a German friend of mine, Gertraud Strangfeld, about 10 years younger than myself, the daughter of my primary school teacher in Braunschweig, I just received two volumes of an autobiography by one Peter Wapnewski, a Heidelberg professor of medieval literature, whose lectures she much admired, and as I started to read, I was reminded that I myself had been consistently shy about venturing into this obscure and problematic facet of literary history. I immediately decided, however, that it was not too late, and began trying to read medieval German literature, accessible as it is on the Internet. Its first appearance is as Das Hildbrandslied (The Lay of Hildbrand). Since, without referring to a translation, I couldn't make out the meaning of a single word, I will let Wikipedia tell you what the Hildbrandslied is all about. > > "The Hildebrandslied ... is a heroic lay written in Old High German alliterative verse. It is the earliest poetic text in German, and it tells of the tragic encounter in battle between a father (Hildebrand) and a son (Hadubrand) who does not recognize him. It is the only surviving example in German of a genre which must have been important in the oral literature of the Germanic tribes." > > "The text was written in the 830s on two spare leaves on the outside of a religious codex in the monastery of Fulda. The two scribes were copying from an unknown older original, which itself must ultimately have derived from oral tradition. The story of Hildebrand and Hadubrand almost certainly goes back to 7th- or 8th-century Lombardy and is set against the background of the historical conflict between Theodoric and Odoacer in 5th-century Italy, which became a major subject for Germanic heroic legend. The fundamental story of the father and son who fail to recognize each other on the battlefield is much older and is found in a number of Indo-European traditions." > > "The manuscript itself has had an eventful history: twice looted in war but eventually returned to its rightful owner, twice moved to safety shortly before devastating air-raids, repeatedly treated with chemicals by 19th-century scholars, once almost given to Hitler, and torn apart and partly defaced by dishonest book dealers. It now resides, on public display, in a secure vault in the Murhard Library in Kassel." > > "The text is highly problematic: as a unique example of its genre, with many words not found in other German texts, its interpretation remains controversial. Difficulties in reading some of the individual letters and identifying errors made by the scribes mean that a definitive edition of the poem is impossible. One of the most puzzling features is the dialect, which shows a mixture of High German and Low German spellings which cannot represent any actually spoken dialect." > > Relying on this summary, I reinterpret Hildbrandslied as an inadvertent recapitulation of ancient Greek mythology, specifically of the conflict between fathers and sons recounted in the stories of the Titans, of Uranos who was overthrown by his son Kronos, who, fearful in turn of being usurped by his children, swallowed them all, except for Zeus whose mother Gaia gave her husband Kronos a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes for him to swallow instead of her child. Zeus was brought up in a cave on Crete and then, having come of age, deposed his father Kronos and forced him to disgorge the stone and the swallowed siblings. The myth of Laius and Oedipus likewise tells a story of the hostility between father and son. These myths are monumental accounts of the potentially hostile relationships within the family. I ask myself whether the Hildbrand myth is an echo of the ancient Greek stories of parricide and infanticide, or whether the myths of the ancient Greeks and medieval Germans are rooted in a universal human dilemma. I remind myself that the trek of Abraham and Isaac to the pinnacle of Mount Moriah and of Jesus to Golgatha might also serve as pointers to native disharmony and discord between fathers and sons. > > Das Nibelungenlied, (The Lay of the Nibelungen) which I then started to read, is written not in Old- but in Middle-High German, is much longer and more completely documented than Hildebrandslied and tells of an entire family, die Nibelungen, wiped out by countless murders within the family. The myth is so complex and convoluted, that rather than try to summarize it, I'll refer you to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibelungenlied for the details, if you're interested. I read Das Nibelungenlied as tragedy, mindful of Aristotle's saying that tragedy purifies the mind by eliciting pity and fear. For years, I have interpreted Numbers 21:6 as an account of the origin and nature of art: > > 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. > 9 And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived. > > I ask whether perhaps stories of intra-family murders that are the theme of the Nibelungenlied were for the people of the Middle Ages like fiery serpents upon which they gazed, like the Israelites in the desert, to save them from perdition. > > Richard Wagner adapted the Nibelungenlied for his opera cycle, Ring des Nibelungen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Ring_des_Nibelungen Today, July 25, incidentally, is the beginning of the annual Bayreuth Festival at which Wagner's operas have been performed at intermittent annual intervals for the past 146 years. My tentative impression is that Wagner's libretti diverge from the original in many respects, and that with his translations and compositions he had no concern for the function of the Nibelungensaga in the societies from which they arose and which perpetuated them. However since I have little interest in studying these issues, I should restrain myself from commenting on them. > > August 3, 2022 > The week's delay has expired. It's time to send you and Jan best wishes for what remains of the summer - and beyond, and to e-mail this letter. Jochen