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caught the ears of Dr. Lenz and his fellow
Germans, especially when he openly suggested the whispered word,
“euthanasia.”
    “ Why not, with Christian
compassion, euthanize the mentally disturbed, the physically unfit
who threaten mankind’s very existence,” he would say and
write.
    “ Compassionate
euthanasia,” the coined phrase being tossed about so casually by
many at the conference, troubled Erich greatly. He had been
thinking about existence lately and the miracle of life, and it
seemed to him to be the most remarkable thing that one could ever
imagine, coming into this world as we do, as nothing more than a
piece of protein. Everything we have been and everything we will
become is tied up in that small world, a microscopic glob of
molecules that somehow stays connected to our ancient history. So
each day, until his father admonished him for doing so, he would
ask the same question to those who would listen: “How could we even
begin to think of ending another person’s existence when that was
all he would ever have?”
    Politically, though, Theodore
Roosevelt himself had years earlier endorsed the eugenics effort to
save humanity (which did impress Erich considerably), while on the
social scene, the idea became quite fashionable with F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s snappy song “Love or Eugenics” floating melodiously
across nightclub dance floors all over America. Even the revered
Supreme Court muscled its way into the act in a sickening case
involving a state’s request to sterilize a young mentally disabled
woman. On a dismally cold and cloudy day when the sun refused to
shine, perhaps as an omen of terrible deeds to come, the great
Justice Holmes strode to the bench and, uttering the words “Three
generations of imbeciles are enough,” unhooked the moral reins
holding science and medicine back. Shortly thereafter the shameful
sterilization of 40,000 mentally disabled women rolled across
America like a giant tsunami.
    What puzzled and bothered Erich more
than what the scientists were advocating, though, was the large
number of theologians and ministers, and even rabbis, who had lined
up behind Charles Davenport and his colleagues in science, when
what they were advocating was clearly wrong, at least in his young
mind. Perhaps America was not the stately and righteous guardian of
human rights the rest of the world believed it to be.
    “ What is there to keep us
from crossing the line, from becoming far less than what God
intends us to be?” he asked his father boldly one afternoon, as
they were standing amid a crowd of American doctors.
    Quickly silenced by his father’s cold
stare, he wandered outside the conference hall and looked eastward
across the harbor and ocean to where he imagined Europe might be.
Everything is changing, he mused. What we are today, we may not be
tomorrow. For a moment he thought of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
sorrowful story of the fanatical scientist who becomes obsessed
with his beautiful wife’s single flaw, a crimson birthmark on her
otherwise flawless cheek. Determined to rid her of this sinful
imperfection, he creates a powerful potion to make the mark
disappear, which it does, but his wife also dies. Hawthorne and
Emerson were the only two American writers Erich found any
enjoyment in reading, because they seemed to embrace Nietzsche’s
criticism of the paramount ideal of human perfection being so
eagerly embraced by science and society. He wasn’t ready for this
new world of medicine like his father was.
    “ What a glorious day for
all of humanity,” Dr. Schmidt shouted out, while standing on the
deck of their ship, to a flight of sea gulls swooping low over the
tops of the breaking waves, searching for their morning meal.
“Darwin’s survival of the fittest can now be manipulated by
science, and we, the scientists, the keepers of the faith, will set
the moral bar for all of civilization to follow.”
    Erich hardly knew his father at times,
and never before had he seen