Thursday 15 October 2020

the great dictator

The same age and born into similar life circumstances and the only other who could pull off their signature facial hair, produced much to the consternation of his native UK as they feared the political satire ran counter to their policy of appeasement (though by the release date—on this day in 1940, that attitude had very much shifted) so changing venues to American cinemas—who maintained a stance of neutrality—the debut of the comedy-drama was a rousing condemnation of fascism and antisemitism. As skewering and honest in its assessment the film was—Chaplin playing both the protagonist and antagonist in the roles of the cut-throat dictator and the downtrodden Jewish barber (with cases of masquerade and mistaken identity), the creator later admitted that had he known the true scale of the horror of the concentration camps at the time, he would have never made the film. Below is a clip from the final address, with the Great Dictator recanting all he’s done.

Saturday 29 August 2020

blessed are the cheese-makers

Having previously used the term turophile (see also here, here and here) to describe our devoted fans, we were delighted for another encounter with the root word in an albeit different though possibly less fringe context and community with artotyrite (แผ€ฯฯ„ฯŒฯ„ฯ…ฯฮฟฯ‚, from the Greek for bread and cheese)—used to name the members of a second century Galatian gnostic Christian sect who celebrated the eucharist with this additional ingredient.
Considered heretical also for allowing women to perform baptisms and hold religious office and for preferring to observe Easter according to the Hebrew calendar in mid-Nisan regardless of the day of the week and hence their other epithet Quatrodeciman—the Fourteeners—but mostly for the cheese, these outcasts who based their practise on the idea of offering first fruits not only of the field but also their flocks to the Divine, presumably also included wine in the sacrament of communion.

Sunday 9 August 2020

endliches und ewiges sein

Along with Bridget of Sweden, Benedict of Nursia, Sts Cyril and Methodius and Catherine of Siena, Edith Stein—taking the religious name of Teresia Benedicta a Cruce—who is venerated as a martyr for her murder in Auschwitz, along with her younger sister and nine hundred eighty-five others in the same deportation, on this day in 1942 (*1891) is considered one of the six co-patrons of Europe and is the only one from the modern era.
Philosopher, teacher, women’s rights advocate, Stein was of Jewish heritage but was not practicing and was later an avowed atheist until turning to the writings of church reformer Teresa of รvila (see above) to help her process the human toll the Great War had and was member of the community and on staff at religious schools in Speyer and Kรถln and tempered her theological beliefs with scholarship and introspection, authoring several metaphysical treatises, including On the Problem of Empathy, Finite and Eternal Being and The Science of the Cross. Stein’s protestations to the pope may have encouraged the Vatican’s censure of the Third Reich but the timidity of the papacy paled Stein’s deserved criticism. Stein is called on for intercession by the converted, called or coersed and is the patroness of orphans and the displaced.

Monday 27 April 2020

im westen nichts neues

After serialisation in a Berlin newspaper, eighteen months in print as a best-seller and translated into twenty-two languages, World War I veteran Erich Maria Remarque’s (*1898 - †1970) anti-war novel All is Quiet on the Western Front, adapted to film by Universal Pictures Studios and premiered in New York City on this day in 1930.   It went on to win two academy awards for its producer and director—notably the first non-musical to be awarded Best Picture.
A censored version shown to a select, restricted audiences on 2 September 1931 (one of the first American films dubbed for the German market already back in December), the film was banned by the Nazis, citing the provocation of having a German soldier portrayed by an American actor and the Jewish heritage of the producer, Carl Laemmle Jr (*1908 - †1979, Imitation of Life, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Bride of Frankenstein, Show Boat), and director, Lewis Milestone (*1895 - †1980, The Front Page, Of Mice and Men, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Pork Chop Hill, Ocean’s Eleven and Mutiny on the Bounty), rather than its message of pacifism and honest and grim portrayals, and did not have a full and proper screening again in Germany until 1952.

Sunday 5 January 2020

namรคndg

On this day in 1938, outside of the courts and with the signature authority of the Reichs-Chancellor, the Interior Minister and nominal participation from the Ministry of Justice, Nazi Germany ratified its Decree Concerning the Changing of Surnames and First Names (das Gesetz รผber die ร„nderung von Familiennamen und Vornamen, kurzform Namร„ndG) in order to facilitate external identification of those with Jewish backgrounds. Fully articulated and enforced by August of the same year, unless Germans and non-citizen residents identified as Jewish already had sufficiently typical Jewish first names—according to a list authorities drafted—the men were to be called Israel and the women Sara and their former identities stripped away in all official documents and registers.

Sunday 2 December 2018

sufganiyot!

Via Miss Cellania for the Festival of Lights (which begins at sunset today, 25 Kislev) and runs through nightfall on 10 December), we are treated to the musical styles of a cappella group Six13’s rendition of “Bohemian Chanukah,” which includes some historic and cultural background of the holiday. The first verse begins:

Is this the eighth night
We light with the family?
Recall with great pride
Our escape from Greek tyranny?

Kindle the lights
Remember the Maccabees
How did those five boys
Lead us to victory?

Wednesday 14 September 2016

peer-review oder lรผgensteine

There was something vaguely familiar among this list of the most infamous scientific hoaxes that prescribe a preventative dose of healthy skepticism that the Presurfer shared. One of the pranks was perpetrated in my old town of Wรผrzburg, just around the corner, at the prestigious university, where among other things, x-rays were discovered, probably began innocently enough but soon became a ruinous scandal.
Rock-hound, early fossil-prospector (though there were collections, at the time in 1725, people didn’t understand how fossils were formed and preserved) and dean of the School of Medicine Johann Bartholomeus Adam Beringer was known to hunt for specimens in the vineyards of Eibelstadt on the outskirts of the city, and some of the professor’s colleagues thought it would be a hoot if they planted some stones there for their cantankerous and rather arrogant co-worker to find. They etched into pieces of limestone impressions of bugs and frogs, which Beringer theorised were either fossils from before the Great Flood or were the artifice of prehistoric tribes. On later expeditions, Beringer also found fragments that bore the name of God in Hebrew characters, and with the evidence of the Tetragrammaton, Beringer decided that these could be no human artefacts but rather “capricious fabrications of God Himself.” Beringer commissioned a lithographer and began publishing volumes of his amazing findings. Even though disliked by the university staff, the hoaxers realised that they had gone too far and admitted to the fraud, discrediting not only Beringer academically but all involved as well. Some of Beringer’s so called Lรผgensteine (lying stones) are on display at the regional museum housed in Fortress Marienberg, and perhaps that’s where I was introduced to these eighteenth century pranksters.  Be sure to check out the link up top for more scandalous episodes of deception and duping.

Monday 22 December 2014

non-canon or holy terror

Columnist Candida Moss approaches the subject of the lack of a biography of Jesus during His K-12 years, childhood and adolescence into early adulthood, through an apocryphal gospel known as the ฮ ฮ‘ฮ™ฮ”Iฮšฮ‘ (the Book of Childhood Deeds) or the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (original link times out, so here is an alternate Wikipedia article on the subject) written sometime in the second century.

Whether this tract was published originally as a dissenting view of the Christian tenet of God manifest as a human—sort of a lampoon or spoof, or as more material to fill in the gaps for a Christian audience hungry for details and more miracles is unclear. Pre-teen Jesus seems to have the problems most children go through and seemed incapable at first of refraining from using his miraculous powers. Though non-canonical as well, there are plenty of other competing stories that place Jesus during his formative years as touring India, Tibet and Persia—and even placing Him in Britain and Japan, learning from other magi. Most scholars believe that as part of a family of carpenters, He would have spent this time as an apprentice, but the Bible is silent on these matters. What do you think? Was Jesus a disciple Himself or a bully with a halo, Who did learn restraint?

Wednesday 6 November 2013

pogrom and defenestration

This Saturday, 9 November, known as the German Schicksalstag, the fateful day, marks the 75th anniversary of individual persecution and prejudice becoming something systematic and institutionalised when on Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) a minority lashed out violently against Jewish citizens and other minorities, importantly with a majority of by-standers who did little to nothing to prevent this. Several initiatives have been launched in memory of this date, including many prominent (and sometime successor) retail outlets respectfully having made their storefronts to look vandalised with shattered decals, in addition to perennial and ongoing reminders of these tragic events.

Saturday 18 August 2012

WWII week: nacht und nebel

There is nothing more difficult to face than inhumanity become concrete. The dishonor, ostracizing, terror, torture, enslavement and disregard were unique in scale and system, but not without painful precedent and legacy, since it is the quality of dismissive otherness that empowers one group to do this to another. Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Romani, Freemasons, the Poles, the Russians, homosexuals, handicapped people, communists, anti-social types, political dissidents and other undesirables all could be stripped of their humanity in fact because it was decided with sanction that never shared it with the oppressors in the first place, on whatever grounds.

Why this was allowed to continue and to what extent the civilian population of Germany and the rest of the world were morally complicit is a question, I think, no one is equipped to fully articulate. What will people believe—not only that it is a dutiful thing to deprive another of his rights on such baseless grounds—the everyday struggle we have with our own petty judgments and prejudices are most certainly successors to all the strife and hate of history but the best any of us can do is strive to be better and positively influence others—but also the sanitized reports that enforced the euphemisms?
I wonder what it is that people want to believe or what is easier to reconcile quickly slips into truth and fact. Today, some former concentration camps are hallowed grounds, memorials to unthinkable loss and cruelty that are unflinching testimony. Like the words on the gate of Dachau, Arbeit Macht Frei, the inscription on the gate of Buchenwald is a double-entrende: Jedem Das Seine could mean “to each his own.”
> When the gate closes and the words are facing the inmates of this largest concentration camp near Weimar, that housed all kinds, the meaning could also be “you get what you deserve.” Nacht und Nebel is the moniker for the overarching Nazi war programme to eliminate all elements that threatened state security (“die deutsche Sicherheit gefรคhrden”) through rendition (being disappeared—night and fog, the term is a spell summoning the powers of sword and magic helmet of Wagner’s Ring Cycle), and of course the existence of such detention facilities was an open secret, vexing with the constant disorientation of transporting internees all over occupied territories, separating families and neighbours, so no witnesses could give the same account for what was happening or the missing might be remembered. Let us hope that we begin to see through such cloaks of the lowest charisma and never forget that a share of humanity is necessarily a share of otherness.

Wednesday 20 April 2011

a moveable feast

 We were a little late in decking out the Easter trappings this year, so there has not been some much time to enjoy them, but of course the holiday hadn't passed us by. Easter itself is a very strange fusion of Christian, secular and pagan traditions and certainly makes for an awkward alibi and accounting, should humans ever be called for testimony in an alien court of law.
Peeps--sorry, can't begin to explain what that one has do with Easter Sunday. What makes it even more extraordinary, and impenetrable like with the non sequitur and surreal rituals, is that the date of Easter can vary so widely, so as the holiday escapes one sometimes, and is figured using a complex, alchemy of maths called the Computus. This method not only previsions computer science, algorithms, matrices, all these correcting factors that make modern Western calendars fit to a lunar one are very much like the cosmology of Ptolemy, who, while acknowledging a sun-centered universe would be more straightforward, sought to preserve the appearances of a geocentric model with all sorts of celestial wheels, gears and cogs.
Getting the liturgical dates right in general, counterbalanced with the cycle of the Moon and the observable equinoxes and the odd Leap Year, helped keep annual occcurances meaningful, coinciding with Spring, Mid-Winter, etc., and guard against slippage and calendar migration that would eventually, glacially led to Easter overlapping or falling before Christmas. That holiday would be a bizarre affair to decorate for.