October 1 ,2022 Dear Benjamin, Thank you for your letter. When you interpret my high school essay about the family as the Christian instrument for making "the world a better place", keep in mind that I was only 15 years old, that I had spent the preceding six years in a backwoods community where our subsistence was contingent on my father's required conversion to Christianity as a "medical missionary". I interpret this experience as analogous to the forced conversion of Spanish Jews in the 15th Century by Ferdinand and Isabella. My role in making the conversion convincing was going to "Sunday School" and attending church. Later, in order to protect my parents from having the house that they had been promised taken away from them, I would become a "Junior Medical Missionary" myself, - but that's another story perhaps for a later letter. By 1942, my parents had concluded that the local schooling was inadequate for their children. Through the agency of their patron, the United Lutheran Church in America, they found the Lankenau Boarding School for my sister Margrit in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. For me they found a place in the 8th grade of Germantown Friends School, and a foster home with the family of a Lutheran postal clerk named Gruber who lived on McCallum Street in nearby Mount Airy. But I was unhappy, I was homesick, as I had been in Chappaqua and Canaan three years earlier, and I went back hometo my parents in January 1943. In addition to doing time in the local Konnarock schools, I spent the ensuing two and a half years in Konnarock, teaching myself, and learning above all, how to be my own teacher. When, on my return to Germantown Friends School in September 1945, the teachers tested me, they concluded that I was ready for 12th grade. I was by far the youngest member of my class. In those years, as I suspect is the case even now, the Quakers, "The Society of Friends" as they call themselves, were alienated from the clergy, from the creeds, from the liturgy, the ritual, the music, the poetry and the visual art of more traditional religions. They convene in weekly "Meetings" loosely supervised by "Elders" where congregants sit together for one hour in a silence which is intermittently interrupted, when someone rises to share a thought with which he has been inspired. The energy of the members of the Meeting is directed toward improving not so much themselves as the world around them. Accordingly, the upper classes were herded into the Meeting House to meditate or tolearn todo so, for one hour every Thursday. Otherwise, except for the course in Religion, which met once a week, the instruction in Germantown Friends School was entirely secular. We studied Milton's Lycidas, not Paradise Lost, Shakespeare's Macbeth, not Genesis, Exodus, the Psalms, Job or Isaiah. The focus of the School's instruction in "Religion" was how to employ "Christianity" to improve the world. My answer, which was to start at home with the family, pleased the teacher, Burton Fowler, who happened to be the principal of Germantown Friends School, and when later that academic year Harvard rejected my application, nominally because I was "too young", but perhaps also because its list of Jewish applicants was full, Mr. Fowler persuaded his acquaintance, Richard Gummere, the Harvard dean of admissions, to make an exception for me and to tack my name onto the end of the list. That's how I got into college. I can count on my fingers, the public religious services in which I've participated away from Konnarock after leaving there in 1945. 1) Margaret's and my wedding on March 8, 1952, 2) Klemens and Lauras wedding, 3) Rebekah's bat mitzvah, 4) Nathaniel's bar mitzvah, 5) your bar mitzvah, and 6) Rebekah's wedding. Attendance at religious services makes me feel isolated, misunderstood and sometimes very lonely. Behind the curtain, or behind closed doors, however, I am an avid amateur, do-it-yourself theologian, no-one's disciple, but an interested reader of Søren Kierkegaard's books. For many years, I have interpreted religion functionally as the ultimate intersection between the herd and its members. I understand God as the highest possible common denominator for the inward subjectivity of the individual and the public objectivity of society. In the opening chapter of the first volume of my novels, I invented a discussion between a student and his teacher: "Ich bin, wissen sie, Herr Professor, in einem protestantischen Glaubensbekenntnis auferzogen worden. Man hat mich überzeugt, dass die Bibel das Wort Gottes sei, und dass des Menschen Beziehung zu Gott darauf beruhe, dass ihm die Möglichkeit gegeben ist, dieses Wort Gottes für sich selbst, auf eigene Weise zu deuten. Sehen sie, Herr Professor, es ist doch genau dies was wir in unserem Berufe zu leisten beanspruchen. Hat nicht die Reformation das Literaturverständnis zur Religion erhoben, und die Religion als Literaturverständnis gedeutet?" [I was brought up in a Protestant denomination to be convinced that the Bible was the word of God, and that a man's relationship to his god was contingent on the possibility of man's interpreting this Word of God in man's own way. Precisely this is the imperative of the study of literature. Did not the Protestant Reformation designate religion to be the study of literature, and elevate the reading and writing of literature to a religion?] Consistent with the foregoing assertion, I consider the reading and writing to which I have devoted so large a part of my life as an essentially religious endeavor. The foci of my understanding of the Bible are 1) The discovery of subjectivity, Exodus 3:1-15 2) The discovery of art, Numbers 21:4-9 3) The discovery of justice, Isaiah 53:1-12 Christianity I understand as expression of confluent post traumatic distress syndromes. Jesus was the child of a single mother who very much longed for a father, and who, brought up in an environment of rabbinical fantasy, imagined, believed, and persuaded his associates that he had God for a father. The society, distraught by unbearable oppression from within and without, first elevated the self-made Son of God to be a prophet, and then crucified him because he appeared as a prophet. Pilate who ordered the crucifixion did so from fear of appearing to be "soft on crime". The enormous success of Christianity in the spiritual market place, I attribute in part to the paradoxical, dialectical phenomena of God becoming man, and man becoming God, thereby reducing spiritual religious stress. In my understanding, Judaism and Christianity are not only complementary; they are in fact facets of a single religious experience. You asked about reading other text I have written in English. The URL http://ernstjmeyer.ddns.net gives you access to many items in English, none of which I can recommend to you. Please feel free to challenge or criticise anything and everything you might look at. The following items are partly or entirely in English: 17 Litigation 19 Family Rosenthal, by Dr. Reinhold Busch 20 Auswanderung (With the Flanders) 21 Book Group 22 Glaucoma Letter 23 Glaucoma Letters pdf 65 Briefe 1949 odt 66 Briefe 1950 odt 67 Briefe 1951 odt 71 Marion Correspondence I 72 Marion Correspondence II 73 Marion Correspondence III 74 Marion Correspondence IV 82 Cynthia Behrman Correspondence I odt 83 Cynthia Behrman Correspondence II odt 84 High School and College Essays 1946-1948 86 Undergraduate Thesis 1949 87 Undergraduate Thesis 1978 - Klemens B. Meyer 88 Ursprung des Zweifels - Sources of Doubt (1961) 90 Donald Flanders AEC Hearing 96 Notes The following is an as yet unedited, indiscriminate collection of notes and letters in both languages, with much repetition. on which I caution you not to spend time. 25 Tagebücher und Briefe 1983 26 Tagebücher und Briefe 1984 27 Tagebücher und Briefe 1985 28 Tagebücher und Briefe 1986 29 Tagebücher und Briefe 1987 30 Tagebücher und Briefe 1988 31 Tagebücher und Briefe 1989 32 Tagebücher und Briefe 1990 33 Tagebücher und Briefe 1991 34 Tagebücher und Briefe 1992 35 Tagebücher und Briefe 1993 36 Tagebücher und Briefe 1994 37 Tagebücher und Briefe 1995 38 Tagebücher und Briefe 1996 39 Tagebücher und Briefe 1997 40 Tagebücher und Briefe 1998 41 Tagebücher und Briefe 1999 42 Tagebücher und Briefe 2000 43 Tagebücher und Briefe 2001 44 Tagebücher und Briefe 2002 45 Tagebücher und Briefe 2003 46 Tagebücher und Briefe 2004 47 Tagebücher und Briefe 2005 48 Tagebücher und Briefe 2006 49 Tagebücher und Briefe 2007 50 Tagebücher und Briefe 2008 51 Tagebücher und Briefe 2009 52 Tagebücher und Briefe 2010 53 Tagebücher und Briefe 2011 54 Tagebücher und Briefe 2012 55 Tagebücher und Briefe 2013 56 Tagebücher und Briefe 2014 57 Tagebücher und Briefe 2015 58 Tagebücher und Briefe 2016 59 Tagebücher und Briefe 2017 60 Tagebücher und Briefe 2018 61 Tagebücher und Briefe 2019 62 Tagebücher und Briefe 2020 63 Tagebücher und Briefe 2021 64 Tagebücher und Briefe 2022 I understand that you have many obligations which leave you little time for writing. Please feel under no obligation to answer any of my letters. My very best wishes to yourself and to Carrie. Love, Jochen