o’zapft is!

Proposed by an events planner who helped organise German Weihnachtsmärkte and former Münchener restauranteur surely also hit hard by the pandemic and whom now resides in Dubai, the announcement that the emirate plans to host a version of Oktoberfest has drawn ire and confusion from the annual party’s venue city. Mirroring its namesake to an extent with beer tents, food concessions and carnival rides, the proposal calls for it being a pavilion of the World Expo and to last for six months rather than the customary two weeks in September. Last year’s festivities were cancelled due to corona, and though uncertainly it seems as if the coming autumn celebrations may also have to be postponed.

7x7

and the oscar goes to: highlights and surprises from the 2021 Academy Awards  

zauberwald: Robert Mertl’s forest photographer captures the aesthetic I aim for during my woodland walks  

canzone russa italianizzata: the Russian Italo-Pop musical stylings of Alla Pugacheva  

cards against humanity: the brilliantly sullen poetry of John Giorno  

yahoo the destroyer: maligning the cannibalised early internet for contributing to the Digital Dark Ages via Waxy—plus a different approach to archiving going forward  

the trouble with tribbles: marketing Flatcat as one’s next robotic feline companion  

art of the title: film lettering over the decades

h-hour

Selected as a target due to its status as a regional transportation hub and medieval town centre that made it especially vulnerable to fire-bombing and with relative destruction surpassing the raid on Dresden a month prior, commenced by the same Royal Airforce Bomber bomber group, the city of Würzburg (previously, see also) was on this day in 1945 in the course of twenty minutes destroyed, with only a little more than a tenth of the historic buildings remaining. Over five-thousand individuals perished. After the war and the city’s occupation by American forces (which continued until 2008), in the ensuing decades, Würzburg was rebuilt as true to the original as possible.

hügel und tal

Taking a rather long, meandering afternoon walk now that Spring has arrived, I headed towards the former border and thought to follow the patrol road, the Kolonnenweg to its terminus understanding that there was a large tri-colour marker to be found there. I think I took a wrong turn or failed to go on long enough but came to a rise below the Hohe Schuhe and hill top clearing that provided a good view of Hermannsfeld and the border tower now a monument beyond. 

Believing I knew a way to return home without backtracking, I followed a logging trail around the mountain and down into a valley of pastures, which I though was familiar at first but then realised I had gone considerably further out of the way than I had intended and ended up in the fields north of Eußenhausen where the former control point and crossing to Meiningen is conserved as a monument.

Trying to get my bearings and finding a cycle path to follow, I discovered the ruins of a church belfry belonging to a settlement called Elmbach or Ellenbach—vacated along with surrounding property during the era of divided Germany as it was too close to the border (see previously), the ruin a reminder of a sixteenth century desertion but yet a poignant symbol, lonely in the fields whatever the circumstance. The tower houses a chapel and since 1989 has been re-consecrated as a symbol of reunion. 

 

 

nutbush city limit

The settlement believed to be founded in the sixth century by a Bavarian nobleman called Focko with its first documented mention in 1070 as part of the lordship of Adalpertus de Fucinging with the name evolving over the centuries from Vuxxhingen, Fukching, Fugkhing and finally to Fucking (see also) in the seventeen hundreds, the village of just over a hundred residents in Upper Austria has agreed as on the New Year to change its toponym, accordingly with some gleichnamiger localities to Fugging in an attempt to better reflect native pronunciation.  Despite the realised potential for using the name as an intensifier for any number of causes, villagers have grown weary of stolen signage and windshield-tourists. The villages of Petting, Kissing, Wanking as well as the affiliated hamlets of Ober- und Unterfucking have not yet indicated any plans to change names.

i’ll take the high road and you’ll take the low road

Though never looking forward to my long workweek commute—which is less frequent in these times and am able to telework (oder Home Office) most days one big consolation is a stretch of road I take over the mountains from outside of Bischofsheim to Fladungen along state road 2288, the Hochrhönstraße, crossing the highlands and connecting two regions as well as a conduit to manage traffic through the UNESCO-recognised nature reserve. Opened to vehicular traffic with fanfare on this day in 1958—construction began in the early 1930s but delayed during the war and only much later was the gravel path asphalted, this twenty-five kilometre scenic route could well be the highlight of any journey but it is especially nice to see just before coming home.

fränkische schweiz

Located in the uppermost pocket of the Franconian Jura and originally bearing the name the Muggendorfer Hills, we had the privilege of touring the region previously “rediscovered” and romantically marketed at the end of the eighteenth century by a couple of law students from the University of Erlangen who wrote about enthusiastically, followed by a 1820 volume by a local historian who coined the new endonym die kleine Schweiz and now had the chance to see it again for a few fresh impressions over the weekend.
First we entered in County Kulmbach the market town of Wonsees with its medieval Felsenburg (rock castle) Fortress Zwernitz, hewn into the dolomite stone, originally the family seat of elevated peasants called the Walpoten—a so-called ministerialis line, that is serfs raised up as servitors and agents into positions of responsibility within the class system of the Middle Ages.
While not technically free and independent, these families held social power and could cultivate their estates and pass along their wealth to the next generation, with equal status accorded to men and women.
Beneath the tower and keep is a seventeenth century cliff garden called Sanspareil landscaped around some strange rock formations and with oriental follies—reminding H and I of the gardens at Veitshöchsheim or Schwetzingen.


Next, following the Burgen- und the Fränkischen Bierstraße (the region having the one of the highest concentrations of traditional breweries in Europe) we came to a village called Aufseß, named for the stream that flows through it, dominated by a castle and chapel with a clutch of some pretty fancy chickens in the property opposite the courtyard who were eager to have their pictures taken by us paparazzi.

With a few detours through Plankenfels and Waischenfeld, we stopped at Burg Rabenstein—a well-preserved Spornburg, a spur castle which is constructed where natural topography aides in its defences that also featured a quite good restaurant, a dripstone cavern and a bird-of-prey demonstration. The intact castle is one of the best conserved—most are ruins but romantic ones—along the route and was originally also in the capable hands of the Rabenstein ministerialis family, who were eventually able to buy the property and ennoble themselves. The castle appears as the main stage for the 1995 wildly popular PC game Gabriel Ritter sequel “The Beast Within”—I was not familiar but I think it was like the equivalent of the King’s Quest saga.
After securing a campsite (we had miscalculated a little and instead of the season’s end like we thought it was busier than expected) in the Veldensteiner Forest outside of Pottenstein, we returned to Gößweinstein with its Burg and basilica minor designed by Balthasar Neumann as a pilgrimage destination.
Our last stop on the way back to the campsite, we drove back through Pottenstein and visited the town, crisscrossed by canals, more fowl not shy of the camera and a row of sleeping ducks (I did not know they did this) and dominated by towering karst towers.
The town is absolutely awash with roses of all sorts; learn more of the story behind that and Saint Elizabeth of Thüringen at the link up top.
We looked at the rock formations from another perspective in the Tüchersfeld neighbourhood of Pottenstein on the way out of Little Switzerland and on our way home.
While not on the itinerary, our last impression for this visit was of the ruin of Burg Neideck, towering above the Wiesen river valley and considered the icon of the region, just outside of the town of Muggendorf

zugspitze

Highest peak of the Wetterstein Mountain range that forms the border between Germany and Austria, the first team of mountaineers to summit it, Josef Naus, guide Johann Georg Tauschl and a survey assistant identified sadly only as Maier, did so on this day in 1820. Though smuggling operations or goatherds might have accomplished this feat first, this documented ascent was in service to the Royal Bavarian Topographic Bureau (Königlich Bairischen Topografischen Bureau) and their commission of an atlas of the kingdom, culminating with the group planting a bergstock to mark their success.  Maximilian I was pleased with the confirmation that the summit lay on his side of the border.

sunday drive: grabfeld

The fertile region in the southern expanse of the Rhön mountains, referred to eponymously as dig- or ditch-field is so named according to local lore that a queen once lost a beloved ring here and ordered the entire land dug up (tilled) until it was found.
In gratitude for its recovery, she founded an estate that would eventually become Königshofen, one of the major market towns dating back to the eighth century.
We took a little tour of the neighbouring counties and first made our way to Bibra, a small settlement focused and informed by the dynasty of imperial knights that governed the duchy since the tenth century and constructed this castle at the town’s centre.
Retaining its original style as a Franconian royal court, Burg Bibra was destroyed during the Peasants’ Revolt and rebuild in the seventeen century true to form—its most recent faithful refurbishment earning a prize in 2002 amongst castle conservators and is presently used as a seminar centre with accommodations for guests.
The patronage of three important prince-electors in the family brought Bibra the church of Saint Leo (dedicated to the early pontiff, Leo the Great), decorated with the altar and sculpture from the school of Tilman Riemenschneider (previously) and is one of the finest examples of late Gothic architecture.

On the way to our next destination, we came across an open-air museum preserved in the former expansive border-zone, demilitarised for decades but with displays of the layers of fortifications and the intervening mine field to imagine.
As with the rest of this strip of terra nullis, it is now a nature preserve and a paradisiacal place for butterflies.

A few detours brought us to the community of Sulzdorf an der Lederhecke to see the gigantic Baroque palace Sternberg, the ancestral seat of a branch of the line of our old friends Count Poppo and the Hennebergs.
We marvelled at it from a distance and it was when we got a little closer, navigating the village directly behind the huge structure that we realised that we had in fact visited once before in May of 2012, noting the calendric symmetry of this construction finalised in 1669 with its four onion-domed turrets representing the seasons, twelve hearths standing for the months of the year, an astonishing and exact fifty-two doors for every week and three hundred sixty-five windows.  I wonder what the story behind that decorating statement was?
The palace is privately owned still and bears some resemblance to the palace of Aschaffenburg, Schloss Johannisburg—the residence of the archbishop of Mainz.
There were koi in the fountain and the watering trough and the Marian figure of one of the rows of homes that were at the rear of the castle was particularly striking for her iconic halo of stars.
Our final stop was a bit more secluded, though in the same community, Sulzdorf an der Lederhecke, as the last and also in private hands and occupied though by descendants of the former von Bibras. This well preserved palace on the water—Wasserschloss—is called Burg Brennhausen and guards the frontier between Grabfeld and the Haßbergen. The current baron is, according to the information board, a petroleum tycoon with a business in the US and divides his time between the palace and a home in Pasadena.

kilian and his companions colmán and totnan

Martyred on this day according to tradition along with two of his associates for reproaching the Count, Hedan II of Thüringen, that his marriage to his brother’s widow was against Church doctrine and therefore would not be considered legitimate—angering the bride-to-be Geliana to the point where, in Hedan’s absence, she summoned this meddlesome priest, called
Apostle to the Franconians having sojourned from his native Ireland, and company to the market square of the city of Würzburg (see previously here, here, here and here) in 689. Three years prior, Kilian travelled from County Kerry to Rome to receive missionary instructions from Pope Conon, who dispatched his troupe to East Francia to convert Duke Gozbert and his subjects, whom still practised pagan rituals.

schmetterlinge

Coincidentally thanks to a post from a fellow blogger, I was able to indirectly identify the butterflies that I encountered in the meadow yesterday gathered around a thistle bloom through his meeting of a Tawny Emperor. These are their European cousins called Apatura metis—that is Freyer’s Purple Emperor (Donau-Schillerfalter), taxonomically classified by entomologist Christian Friedrich Freyer of Ansbach in 1829, and so called as the open wings of the males display blue and purple, if viewed from the right angle but normally appear to have more subdued harvest colours.

vittore e corona

Feasted on this day in parts of northern Italy, Austria and Bavaria, Saint Corona (or sometimes going by her Greek equivalent, Stephanie, στέφᾰνος—both denoting one who is crowned) is forever twain with Victor of Damascus, an early Christian martyr serving as a soldier in the province of Syria.
Before being ultimately beheaded for refusing to renounce his faith in 170 A.D. during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the imprisoned Victor was brought provisions and encouraged to preserve despite the bodily tortures he was made to endure by a woman called Corona, identified according to different sources as either the sister of one his fellow enlisted men or Victor’s wife. The authorities decided to apprehend her as well—and according to her hagiography, and as depicted rather bizarrely on this turn of the century fruit sticker—the crest of the greengrocers’ guild of Vienna, was put to a rather gruesome death for comforting the imprisoned by being bound to opposing palms trunks and being torn asunder once released. Rather than being invoked in times of plague, Corona is the patron of gambling and the lottery and called upon for circumstances involving money or treasure.

gangolf der heiliger

In honour of the Burgundian saint’s feast day, 11 May, whom has developed quite a local cult following, we’re sharing a few impressions of the nearby chapel of Gangulphus (Gangolf and Gangolfskapelle, see previously) on the foothills of the Rhön over looking the town of Fladugen.

First consecrated by the archbishop of Würzburg in 1496, razed during the Reformation and Peasants’ Revolt and rebuilt in 1597, the Gothic structure with semi-circular apse is decorated inside in Roccoco style and the grassy knoll rests a top an ornate and flowering Marian Grotto (Mariengrotto)—the shrine well-tended and filled with the objects of devotion, votives and prayers of pilgrims.

himmelsspektakel

During the pre-dawn hours of this morning in 1561, there was a mass sighting of an unexplained celestial phenomenon involving what was perceived to be the aerial battle of hundreds of unidentified flying objects in the skies above Nürnberg.
Though widely dismissed as hysteria reinforced by the contemporaneous publication, documentation of the event in the city’s broadsheet for circulation by printer Hans Wolff Glaßer and explained away as the convergence of otherwise mundane atmospheric phenomena, aspects of the reported skirmish by witnesses of darting bright spheres, tubes globes, crescents and cylinders followed by the appearance of a large black triangular object that occulted the rising sun before crashing in the countryside is pretty tantalising and is a textbook close-encounter of the second kind. A similar sighting occurred five years later in the skies over Basel on three occasions in late July and early August.

der honigdieb

Though perhaps best known for his iconic portraits of contemporary celebrities, like this one of Martin Luther that’s become synonymous and defining, the imagination, which takes a rather lurid turn at times, of the painter and printmaker Lucas Cranach the Elder (*1472 – †1553, confusingly from the village of Cronach) also has a legacy worth contemplating—especially after the accusations and misapprehensions that the shock of the naked body in classical and Renaissance art wasn’t some soft smut for the elite with the intrinsic value, patronage and support system not accorded to the prole material made by machine and put out by Pornosec for the masses. We are confronted with this question by a new exhibit in the Compton Verney Gallery in Warwickshire—encapsulated by the some twenty known versions of Cupid complaining to Venus (1526, Venus mit Amor als Honigdieb)—all of which portray the two classical love deities gossiping, nude but Venus naked in a wide-rimmed hat with ostrich plumes and Cupid assailed by bees for having snatched a bit of honeycomb from the apple tree that they’re standing under. The subject was popular enough, based off a bucolic poem by Theocritus called Κηριοκλέπτης (Keriokleptes, same meaning) for Cranach to sell basically two dozen copies with slight variation with Venus laughing off Cupid’s lament and comparing the stings of the provoked bees to his own smitten arrows. One has to wonder what was informed by carnal experience and what was moralising and emendating in his portfolio. Visit the entire collection online at the link above.

ausgangssperre

Though we’ve already both been trying to avoid going out in public as much as possible, Bavaria joins Italy, California, Paris and many other places in a near total lockdown and restriction on movement—modelled after early and successful interventions in Asia that virtually stopped the spread of COVID-19.
It is not to much to ask that other municipalities, neighbourhoods, households absent leadership to do the same and look out for the vulnerable in your communities and offer to pool shopping trips to limit unnecessary exposure and to make sure everyone’s needs are met—especially worrying considering that the first cases were detected in the United States and South Korea on the same day, 20 January 2020, and while the latter has managed to contain the spread, the former has been grossly inept. A long-distance commuter, before being dismissed permanently to tele-work, I slowly realised my rather abrupt descent into full blown Lady Macbeth madness, real business stopped anyway and little to do except agonise over the news, wash my hands and disinfect. Wash my hands, disinfect. Wash my hands.
As a certified misanthrope, I was not enjoying my splendid isolation as much as I should have and grew highly but silently suspect of those I thought were being too careless about personal space and touching their faces. One should not beat oneself up over missteps but I did not really pack properly for this occasion and though taking the largest suitcase I had, I didn’t seem to have brought nearly what I ought to have—I think that was the moment I realised I had gone a bit addled by the stress. It is good to have a list and advance plan.  I did have the wherewithal at least to provide for my house plants and moved them to the balcony and at the office to a common area where someone can attend to them in my possibly, likely extended absense.
There’s the ghostly smudge above of where a poor pigeon crashed into the window spreadeagle—years ago but the mark is still there. The other images: the school lessons left on the stoop, the abandoned Corona display shelf and the removed outdoors seating were other signs of shifting changes. As good as a disinfectant as sunshine can be, the first inviting signs of spring after a gloomy middling winter brought people out in throngs and in close proximity, flounting the advice of health authorities and prompting the state government to intervene with an imposed restriction on movement and assembly. Stay safe, stay healthy, stay calm and look out for one another and please stay inside—like an indoor cat, you can do it.