This is Paris or London or Rome and many other editions, ล aลกek believed might prompt the next generation to imagine and understand a world not defined by brinksmanship and competition but cooperation and commonality. His message and distinctive Mid-Century Modern style is resonant with contemporary audiences and many of his books were re-released in the early Aughts.
The old footbridge features—as do many bridges across Europe—a statue of John of Nepomuk, a fourteenth century saint who was royal confessor and counsellor to the Queen of Bohemia. Despite threat of death, Nepomuk refused to betray the privilege of priest and confessor to a jealous King Wenceslas who ordered Nepomuk cast into the Vltava (Moldau) for being obstinate.
The martyr’s most famous representation is the figure on the Charles Bridge (Karlลฏv most) in Prague on the spot where he was drowned. Because of his fate and discretion, John of Neomuk is the patron saint protector from drowning and floods as well as respect for the seal of attorney-client privilege, doctor-patient confidentiality and comparable arrangements.
To celebrate the long career of the recently departed Czech screenwriter, director and professor Miloลก Forman Coudal Partners refers us to a gallery of international movie posters promoting his earliest works.
Though perhaps better known for his later contributions of the award-winning One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Hair, Amadeus, The People vs Larry Flint and Man on the Moon (the Andy Kaufman biopic), Forman’s final 1967 film in his native Czechoslovakia before self-imposed exile portrays a series of disasters that befalls a small town with endemic corruption and the inadvertent outcomes of the best-intentioned plans. Recognised as a cutting satire of Eastern European politics, the film was banned in perpetuity after the Warsaw Pact invasion of the country (a countermeasure to the Prague Spring of reformist Alexander Dubฤek) in the night of 20 August 1968.
We very much enjoyed making the acquaintance of artist and illustrator Kvฤta Pacovskรก, born in Prague in 1928 where she still works and lives.
Her life-time contributions prompted the International Board on Books for Young People to honour her with the highest recognition that a children’s author or illustrator can receive—the Han Christian Andersen Award—in 1992 and Pacovskรก has a long list of credits (including cut-out and pop-up books, including the titular composition that was extraordinarily expandable and had other surprising elements to propel the story and the reader’s imagination well off the printed page) and educational software that she has graced with her talents. This particular series is sourced to a portfolio of work for the 1968 publication of Karliฤka a bรญlรฝ konรญk (Karl and the White Horse) by Branka Jurcovรก, plus there are more galleries of Pacovskรก’s commissions at the link above
Active from 1945 to 1965, influential Czech illustrator and animator Jiลรญ Trnka was heralded as the Walt Disney of Eastern Europe for his manner of storytelling that drew on classic folktales but his distinctive stop-motion short films were allegories intended for adult audiences and a vehicle for satire. Trnka found two partners and started an animation studio called Bratลi v Triku (Brothers in Tricks) and eventually discovered his style, returning to the puppets that he used to entertain friends and family in his childhood.
Their early productions received international acclaim, recognised at the Cannes and Venice film festivals and Trnka managed to skirt the censors with messages that were mild to pointed rebukes of the Communist government. In his final years, however, Trnka’s output became more cynical and bolder in challenging the regime. His crowning achievement—and sadly his last work, dying four years later and banned as subversive after his death—was a short called Ruka (The Hand), which depicts a potter commissioned unwillingly to sculpt a likeness of the all-powerful Hand. Despite being pressured and plied awards and commendations, the potter views this as an unwelcome imposition (he’d rather be left to craft pots for his friends the flowers) turning into persecution as the Hand won’t relent. The potter escapes briefly and runs back home, tossing off his burden of medals and tries to barricade himself in his closet but as he does so, a flowerpot crashes down on his head—killing him. The Hand, afterward, holds a pompous funeral for the potter just as Trnka’s native Plzeล honoured him with a large public event. Only posthumously censored, The Hand may have been a prelude of the Prague Spring of 1968 and signal of a gradual socio-political thawing in the East.
Inspired by more venerable horologes in Prague and Rouen, the village of Starรก Bystrica (starรก means old) in Northern Slovakia incorporated an astronomical clock into its central square under major reconstruction in 2009.
The modern clockwork is satellite- and radio-controlled, informed by atomic clocks and is the most accurate of its type, with an astrolabe displaying the phases of the Moon and the march of the constellations. The rippling, billowing design of the tower is a stylised form of Maria Dolorosa, patroness of the country and the tolling of the hour is accompanied by a procession of saints connected with the area—including brothers Cyril and Methodius.
Calvert Journal introduces us to the photographic talents of Karol Palka who has carefully curated several living museums that embody the vanishing sheen of Communist-era interiors of his native Poland and former Soviet satellite neighbours. Take a tour of these ambitious and aspirational settings that are certainly worth preserving at the links above.
At some point in our lives (sort of like the Restaurant at the End of the Universe of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy) I think all of us pass through that massive five storey night club on the banks of the Vltava in Prague’s old town. Maybe it’s a place that need only be taken in once but perhaps the newest resident disc-jockey on rotation for a few weeks now, however, is rather novel and propels our narrative of eventualities ahead closer towards its technological conclusion in the form of a untiring robotic arm that selects music and tweaks tees up the playlist with flair (see a short video demonstration at the link). It is unclear whether or not the DJ can gauge audience reception and excitement or can only base its play-list based on an insular algorithm, and KUKA (an adapted automotive assembly-line unit) is relieved every other hour by a human counterpart.
The Calvert Journal has an interesting profile of the lesser scrutinised art form, relegated to children’s entertainment, of animation and the role that allegory communicated through this medium played in protest movements in Eastern Europe and Soviet satellite states, particularly in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The study with a gallery of examples (not the ersatz Itchy and Scratchy pictured) from the 1950s onward demonstrates the parabolic reach of the message (the animatic being the synchronised storyboard) considering that in most cases the state was the lone patron of cartoons, looking into the past when puppet theatre and other antecedents could be as covertly subversive, plus how contemporary artists are rediscovering animation as powerful form of commentary.
Though I can’t say for certain that many hikers will cross our path, we discovered that our new home, remote and rather secluded as it is, lies just behind the intersection of two of the European Long Distance Routes (the nearest point of reference shared by both trails is the City of Coburg), marked and maintained hiking paths that follows ancient trade and pilgrimage routes. From north to south, one stretches from Lapland through Finland and Sweden through Germany and Austria to the Adriatic coast, and from west to east, the other spans from Spain following el Camino de Santiago (der Jakobsweg) through France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, the Czech Republic onto the shores of the Black Sea in Bulgaria. What an amazing journey to embark on and to think we are at if not the centre-point at least a nexus of sorts.
Though Czech is the adjectival form and perhaps the additional republic makes the country sound as if it has to legitimise its standing somehow, the proposal of the Czech Republic (ฤeskรก republika) to change its English and hence international handle to Czechia smacks to me like a page from Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis, in waking up to find oneself transformed in order to keep up with the times—those times being rather fickle and unperturbable.
Since the divorce from Slovakia, the country has been known as Tschechien in the German Sprachraum, which to my ears sounded too close to Tschetsschenien (Chechnya) and I feel that this forced change is confusing as well—though not exactly without some historical precedence, going back to latinate-loving Englanders observing the Holy Roman Empire’s tenant states. One has to wonder about exonymy and endonymy and the success rate of rebranding.
I was familiar enough, I thought, with legendary the Prague (Praha) of the late Renaissance and dormitories and laboratories constructed on the castle grounds for research into alchemy and the esoteric arts, but failed to appreciate that this commission and many of the scattered artefacts, both tangible and in the realm of ideas that challenge received knowledge, have a singular provenance thanks to the curiosity of one practitioner and patron, Hapsburg Emperor Rudolf II.
Prior to the early decades of the fourteenth century, the civil and spiritual landscape of Britain and the whole of Europe looked very different than it does today, and it is inexorably difficult for modern minds, I think, to grasp how very alien that proximity was. No one was more than an hour’s walk separated from a monastery or covenant—comparable to the fact that settlements were more or less paced out, before sprawl took hold, a day’s distance on foot from one another, and if one was not directly under the employee of the institution as a farmer, physician or teacher, one still benefited from the round the clock prayers that the members engaged in for the whole of humanity.
Though it is probably more likely that the later Czech sociologist Karl Deutsch expressed the sentiment to the effect that, “the essential part about nationhood is getting one’s past all wrong,” rather than the earlier French historian and orientalist Joseph Ernest Renan (whom it’s been attributed to), Renan did certainly write that the coalescing of a state requires that people have a lot in common as well as a collective amnesia—remarking that no respecting member of the New Republic dare own up to the frenzied, shameful massacre of the Albigensian Crusade.
This theologian who had a crisis of faith while looking deeper into the historical personage of Jesus and was unable to reconcile Church doctrine with the time-line was writing during a period of transition, the late nineteenth century, generations from the French Revolution, the terrors and resurgence with the Napoleonic Wars and during a time sadly insatiate for what was called progress. Posthumously, and despite Renan’s own critique of tribalism, certain elements of his readership championed his works as justification for colonialism, empire-building, and later eagerly advocating fascism and the politics of race. It nonetheless rings true, I think, that it’s an essential part of a founding, abiding myth—from Rome, England and to America—that a people joined or lumped together be mistaken about certain contexts and have heroes to worship. The later Deutsch, inheritor to all this misguided zeal, in contrast, helped people realise their folly and installed counter-measures. Huginn (Thought) and Muninn (Remembrance) are the pair of cosmic ravens that surveyed the Earth and roosted with and reported to the Norse god Odin—sort of like the private counsel of a conscience or complimentary set of shoulder-angels.
Thanks to a report shared by the exceedingly brilliant and adventurous Nag-on-the-Lake on the curious and quirky so-called Paternosters, I was reminded of an item I’d recently heard on the local news that’s unleashed a minor tempest. I thought the looping passenger lifts, like escalator stairs and properly called cyclic elevators or Personenlaufzรผge (people circulating elevator), were called Paternosters because the ride was particularly harrowing and induced one to recite the Lord’s Prayer—which may well be but they are also called such because the mechanism is similar to praying the rosary.
Earlier this month, on a small but serviceably large (bigger than the Vatican and Monaco) patch of terra nullius, a disputed area along the borderlands of Serbia and Croatia, an enterprising Czech politician founded a new micronation called Liberland.
Although the fledgling nation is not officially recognised by any traditional legitimising authority yet, the boundaries are already on the map thanks to a concerted marketing and branding offensive that rivals those of many well established countries. The profile from Quartz Magazine features links to Liberland’s extensive virtual presence with designs to have a permanent, physical presence in the near future. Given the successful organising charter and faith of volunteers and aspiring citizens, it makes one wonder what constitutes a state and who else might be able to pull it off. Do the trappings and symbols of state confer statehood alone? What do you think?
pรญratar: Iceland’s dominant Pirate Party may extend shelter and citizenship to the Fugitive
kinematografii: a collection of vintage Czechoslovakian film posters
3 quarks for muster mark: some of the invented words of author James Joyce
birds’ eye: an eagle presents Dubai as he descends to his trainer below
be mine: camera embedded in a ring box captures marriage proposals from a face-forward perspective
Between what has become attested by history as the First and Second Crusade, there were several abortive waves of recruitment, which poor conditions in Europe—including poor harvests, civil unrest and the usual skirmishes between the kingdoms of the realm. Outside of the chief cities of Jerusalem, Haifa, Acre, Jaffa, Tripoli, Antioch and Edessa, control of the Crusader States territory was tenuous at best and quite treacherous for pilgrims or relief- and resupply-convoys. The advent of a novel military, monastic order, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, the Templars in short-form and followed by the Knights Hospitaller, who could provide armed escourt was a help but their numbers were too disperse to launch coordinated campaigns and besides answered to God and the Church and were not a mercenary shock-force beholden to a local lord, as was the norm for Europe and the Middle East during this time. No ruler, however rich, for the most part had the luxury of maintaining a standing-army in times of (relative) peace and had to raise forces with a call to arms. The Templars and the other orders, in contrast, were constantly training in the art of battle and comprised, along with their Islamic counterpart, the Assassins, the Occident’s first professional fighting-forces. After around five decades of occupation, the County of Edessa was retaken by Islamic forces, under the leadership of Emir Zengi of Mosul, making the Holy Land all but inaccessible overland to Latin Christendom.
Antioch and other strategic lands looked poised to follow handily. Though the climate may not have been organically ripe for such a mobilisation, with a little assistance by another, charismatic papal legate who appealed to the noble sacrifices made by this Greatest Generation of fifty years hence and the mopey guilt of a young king of France for his immortal soul, eager to do penance and only a Crusade might cleanse his conscious. The adolescent king, Louis VII, in a whirlwind of events, had just months before found himself married to the wealthiest and most powerful heiress in the world, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and then with the death of his father, found himself elevated to the throne.
Being the king in Paris was a titular affair, as unruly landowners, his teenage wife included who controlled the whole of southwestern France, held much more legitimate power than him, and it was on an early mission to quash a rebellion in the Marne, Louis VII discovered that his men had corralled the entire population of an upstart village, Vitry-en-Perthois, into the church and then proceeded to burn it to the ground. This event haunted Louis for his entire life and sought to make amends and was willing to do anything to save his soul from eternal damnation. Having received the urgent pleas for assistance from the Crusader State, a relatively freshly-elected pope, Eugene III, approached his mentor, the monk Bernard of Clairvaux, as Bishop Adรฉmar had done for the First Crusade, to rouse the people of France to action. Regarding his pupil as somewhat of a rustic, a hayseed, Bernard took the matter into his own hands, and just as with the first crusade, there was some mission-creep.
Bernard not only made quite an impression on the people of France, he also traveled to Germany, leaving quite a chain of miracles in his wake and sent missives even further afield.
Eleanor of Aquitaine survived her ordeal but the royal union did not, enchanted first by the opulence of Constantinople, which must have made her staid court in Paris seem like an absolute sty, and then entertained by her uncle, Raymond of Poitiers, in Antioch—where Eleanor found herself among compatriots whom spoke her native Langue d’Oc, both of which Louis found infuriating and there was talk that Eleanor’s close relationship with her host and uncle had become too familiar. All of a sudden, Eleanor expressed her wish to renounce the title of Queen of France, and she sued for annulment of her marriage, based on consanguinity, that she and her husband were fourth cousins and consequently had only had female issue. Louis had Eleanor kidnapped and dragged along to Jerusalem. It was a hard slog over treacherous mountains and sea, with the Turkish forces ambushing the Crusaders at every turn.
All the Crusader forces eventually massed in Jerusalem, but as Edessa—the original object of the Kings’ Crusade, although Jerusalem and absolution was Louis’ own goal—bereft of its Christian population, and places of worship was not really worth the effort any longer. Louis was also probably not overly disposed to helping Antioch by securing the principality’s perimeter, what with his wife having been romanced by its ruler. The armies convened at Acre to try to figure out what to do with all this pent up aggression, concluding disastrously to try to take the city of Damascus, the only Muslim city to have negotiated a peace treaty with the Kingdom of Jerusalem and whose failure was obvious from the outset. Like the bickering Louis and Eleanor magnified and reduplicated thousands of times, the coalition under national commands felt betrayed and had even managed to alienate themselves from former allies, split up and departed by sea back to the mainland. Eleanor and Louis took separate ships. Once back on the mainland, Eleanor was granted a divorce and regained her vast land holdings in Aquitaine and Poitiers—and left her daughters in Louis’ custody.
Shortly afterward, Eleanor began to fancy another relation—Duke Henry of Normandy and Count of Anjou, and following a short courtship, Eleanor and the heir to the British throne married. Upon the death of Henry I and Henry’s older brother Stephen, the young couple became king and queen of England. As happened with Louis’ sin of omission that led to an entire village perishing while locked in a burning church, Henry II allowed his henchmen to get out of control and murder his former chancellor become archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas ร Beckett. Henry was devastated, both personally over the death of his friend that he did not prevent and because his popularity plummeted—forever pinning Henry II with the badge of the king who killed an archbishop (the cathedral becoming a pilgrimage destination to rival the popularity of Way of Saint James, Santiago de Compostela), rather than the reformer who helped to rebuild England after successive civil wars and crises of succession. 
A small village near Weimar, the city that hosted Goethe and Schiller, Bauhaus and the Weimar Republic, is facing some sharp criticism over its suggestion to house refugees in the officers' barracks of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. There unspeakable horrors associated with the memories of this place, and ironically it seems that our memory has become quite a feeble and atrophied thing. The immigration question is a complex one, but so is Germany’s relation to its past—much more so. Do Germans yet have guilt to discharge from the first half of the twentieth century? Surely, as do many of us—but does this make them to feel grudgingly obligated to accept more and more evacuees? That’s harder to answer—as with the Wirtschaftswunder that characterized Germany’s rebuilding and recovery after the wars ended was made possible to a very large extent through its guest worker programme, many also argue that Germany needs an infusion of a young population to sustain its present and retiring work-force and that Germany on balance benefits from immigration.
I also feel that we are prone to lose our perspective as well: we’re welcoming in these people who’ve mostly been on the run from poverty and violence.
Mostly—and I think we choose to focus on those exceptions and malingerers. We also forget that while the sites of former concentration camps are sacred places, they were not recognized and consecrated as such right away and were regarded very differently depending on whether one found himself in East or West. Buchenwald was used by the Soviets initially as an internment camp for Nazi prisoners-of-war—although political-dissidents were also held there; Dachau and other locations in West Germany was first used to contain Germany’s own refugee crisis. Some fourteen million ethnic Germans were forcibly expelled from territories either ill-gotten and taken back (like Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia), lands that had been historically German, like much of Prussia that went to Poland and the Soviet Union, for centuries and other European cities where they were no longer welcome, like Amsterdam, were resettled in a Germany in ruins. Not only did the expelled Germany have to leave everything behind, they also faced the prospect of starting all over in a homeland that maybe was not at all familiar to them—their families perhaps living abroad for generations, spoke differently, had strange mannerisms, didn’t eat proper German food and were failing to integrate—and try to live among a population that if not outright hostile to the refugees were themselves struggling and barely had enough to provide for themselves, to say nothing for these newcomers. In the 1950s, once these crises had somewhat subsided, the regimes of the two Germanys took different positions on how the past was to be remembered. East Germany was quicker to turn Buchenwald and other sites into memorials and strongly encouraged people to visit, especially school-children, to face the incomprehensible and dread past. Whereas, in the West, the subject remained uncomfortable and while not going ignored or unexplored, talk was taboo for a long time and it really was not until Reunification that the public became more willing to confront their autobiographies. Perhaps empathy is yet harder to face.
During the last years of the war, Nazi scientists were working on a secretive underground construction programme in the catacombs of mines in the Lower Silesian region, code named Project Riese—Giant.
Supposedly the housing was a containment field for a mysterious substance known as Xerum 525, speculated to be anything ranging from red mercury to anti-matter—and once activated, the device may have been an experimental fusion bomb, an anti-gravity propulsion engine, a TARDIS, or a sort of magic, quantum cauldron for looking into the future. “Foo-fighter” was the term that Allied airmen used for unidentified flying objects and other strange aerial phenomena. If die Glocke did exist, its ultimate fate is too unknown, some say it was an escape pod, some theorizing that it remains in South America and others believing that it’s mothballed in Area 51, with the occasional cameo-appearance, like in the 1965 space acorn incident in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania.
