fürstenberg / havel (11. 896)

Leaving Himmelpforte on the Stolpersee, we headed back slowly towards our home port on Röblinsee for an early departure the next morning.

After the narrows through the Havel, we took the boat around the alcoves that make up the quartet of lakes around the small city (called Wasserstadt) and passed the entrance to the memorial to Ravensbrück concentration camp marked with a posthumously upscaled version of East German sculptor William Lammert die Tragende (Woman with Burden) statue—most of his art destroyed by the Nazis as degenerate and subversive—installed with the opening of the Gedenkstätte in 1959. Exploring Fürstenberg a bit more, we came across a monument to Lenin hidden in the overgrowth in front of the abandoned barracks before venturing to the city centre for dinner at the pier.

konzentrationslager uckermark (11. 894)

H and I took a hike around the forested trail of the Sidowsee out of Himmelpfort and continued along the path back towards Fürstenberg. 

A sub-camp for forced labour of the Ravensbrück Women‘s detention centre, little remains in terms of remembrance for this concentration camp for young girls and women considered difficult or otherwise delinquent for various infractions and were put to work under very harsh conditions (the overseers, Aufseherinnen, were particularly brutal and subject to the Ravensbrücker Prozess by British authorities for war crimes). Girls as young as sixteen produced components for Siemens & Halske for the war effort, including V2 rocket bombs and intercom systems for submarines, and once they aged out at twenty-one, they were transferred to Ravensbrück. 

The juvenile camp was closed at the beginning of 1945 to convert it to an emergency extermination operation with a gas chamber, with some five-thousand female inmates deemed too sick, uncooperative of having outlived their usefulness for slave labour at fifty-two. Of the estimated one hundred thirty thousand women processed through Ravensbrück, the site conserved and memorialised after being liberated by the Soviets in March of 1945 along with the site at Uckermark, some additional fifty thousand perished due to punishingly austere treatment, starvation rations and medical experimentation. Eighty percent were political prisoners (members of the resistance) from all over Nazi occupied territories with a significant population of Jewish, Sini and Roma women imprisoned only for their heritage. Inmates were forced to wear triangles sewn into their uniforms in order to denote their crime and nationality—often in combination—lesbians, prostitutes, Romani (leveled with the accusation of racial pollution) and those who refused to get married were lumped together and wore black triangles.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Operation Nickel Grass (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: a visit to Büdingen, assorted links to revisit plus Victorian mosseries

eight years ago: computer-generated music from Alan Turing 

nine years ago: the inspiration for the Flying Dutchman plus automating laundry

ten years ago: the reasoning behind making Brussels the capital of the EU plus Wikipedia as a major

coeli porta (11. 892)

 

Departing Röblinsee through the Fürstenberg lock and crossed the canal into Stolpsee, and although intending just to stop at a municipal harbour to check out the town, we ended up staying moored at entrance to Himmelspfort, the spot turning out to be idyllic, essentially all to ourselves and aligned with what we envisioned camping by boat would be. After we got settled, we took a look at the ancient town named for a former Cistercian monastery, abandoned and left for ruins after sacralisation but the adjacent brewery founded by the monks was still intact and active.

The town is also known for its Weihnachtspostamt, upholding a tradition began by two postal workers in 1984 when they started answering children’s letters to Santa Claus (the Weihnachtsmann in East German times)—the whole town kind of has a Christmas theme and today, the postal service answers around three-hundred thousand letters from all over the world, but apparently is only one of seven addresses in Germany for such dispatches.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: fantastic spiralling art with AI (with synchronoptica), a graphic design collection curated by Kristen Lound plus LEGO as a media for fine art

seven years ago: murderous dioramas, proposed sovereignty for a Great Lake plus Japanese bathroom ghosts

eight years ago: Obama to his successor on unfinished business, solar plasma eruptions, a new front in the Cola Wars plus early canned, robotic music

nine years ago: holiday creep

ten years ago: the Ebola outbreak, stealing drug-offenders identities plus the landed gentry unchanged for a thousand years 

finowsee, woblitzsee, drewensee und zurück (11. 891)

Leaving the habour, we hooked up and to the north through a narrow channel that led to the Greater and Lesser Priepert lakes through the Finowsee that forms a round bend in the river.We pasted underneath the Hausbrücke Ahrensberg, a covered bridge (one of the few intact in northern Germany) that spanned the crossing to Drewensee.

 

 

Taking a long canal through the forest, we arrived at the inlet to Woblitzsee and stopped in the small town of Wesenberg to walk the dog and have a late lunch. The place is dominated by a high Middle Ages hilltop fortress (Turmhügelburg).

 

The lock at the outlet turned out to be the the most powerful one in the network of waterways with the floodgates really powerful instead of the usual sinking and rising and ended up passing through twice in rather quick succession as the anchorage we planned to stay at on the way to Neustelitz was closed for the season.Rather than risk getting stuck somewhere after the locks closed, we headed back to the first camp by Fürstenberg, seeing some of the boating lesson in practise and navigating the buoys which warn of hazards and the course to take that switch depending on whether one is travelling up- or downstream, and arrived just at sunset.

vom ellbogen see bis pälitzer seeplatte (11. 889)

Well provisioned and with a plan, we set out crossing a number of small and expansive lakes linked by a series of narrow canals through the woods and wetlands facing fairly soon our biggest fear—justifiably so—about navigating such a bigger boat with the locks, sluices (Schleuse) before us. All different given the landscape, some vessels one can secure by hand or hook—though I was feeling my arms loosed from their sockets by the end of the day and the preferred method is tying them down with ropes and despite being somewhat of a knot enthusiast and knowing the ropes as it were in the case etymology and terminology, logic was failing in practical application and made the experience more stressful than needed. Regardless, we made it—I couldn’t imagine doing so during full-throttle tourist season with other big boats piloted by amateurs and gaggles of canoes. 

 

 

 

Having stopped briefly in the village of Priepert to walk the dog—in my head I was calling it Pripyat like the Chernobyl disaster town, first no good reason and perfectly pleasant but not a lot outside the dock, we had to turn back from our goal towards Rheinsbergs in the southern reaches, as the sluices were already closing down early and many of the available harbours were shut for the public. We had to turn back in time to make the last connections and docked overnight back in Priepert.

synchronoptica

one year ago: more adventures in Frankonia wine country (with synchronoptica) plus proof of galaxies beyond our own

seven years ago: De Dion-Bouton four-wheeler, the storyboards of Sergei Eisenstein plus Trump visits Puerto Rico

eight years ago: Japanese joinery, a French driving hazard, a Mexican Bat Woman plus combatting typographical tofu

ten years ago: the demands of the Olympic Committee

eleven years ago: the Rushmore Syndrome 

bundeswasserstraße obere havel (11. 888)

H and I travelled north for a houseboating holiday on the Havel, which intersects with a few different national parks crossing the borders between Berlin, Brandenburg and Mecklenburg Vorpommern. 

With our point of departure Röblinsee, leading to connections to the various lake districts (Seenplatten—including the Müritz where we visited years and years ago), we arrived at the harbor at midday and after orientation and a training module to operate the boat safely, it was too late to venture out before sunset and stayed in the dock in Fürstenberg overnight. 

The neighbourhood fronting the riverbank was lined with fancy villas and the industrial ruins of multipurpose food processing factory (Mischfutterwerk) was visible on the opposite shore. Three years prior to the Cuba Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union placed six armed launch for medium range R-5 Побе́да (Victory) nuclear warheads in early 1959–garrisoned troops left the small town in 1994. Behind the row of stately homes built originally for retirees from Berlin, a housing high rise for soldiers and their families stationed there. After an evening of planning and studying the channels and rotes, we were ready to head out.

big chris, little chris (11. 717)

Venerated on this day in German-speaking dioceses (the following day on the General Roman Calendar of the Saints) on the occasion of his martyrdom in 251 in Anatolia, the Canaanite of legendary stature, imposing and standing at five cubits (2,3 metres), called Reprobus (reprobate and also by some accounts and portrayals, dog-headed due to a misunderstanding of the Latin demonym Cananeus for suggesting cynocephaly) was determined to be in service to the greatest king of all, and upon seeing his ruler blessing

himself with the sacrament of the sign of the cross at the mention of Satan and reasoning that the devil able to inspire such trepidation must certainly be more powerful abandoned his post and sought out this master to service. Falling in with a gang of robbers claiming to be in league with the devil, the giant of a man was again disappointed by seeing the leader avoiding Christian iconography and sought out the faith under the guidance of a hermit he had encountered. Responding with prayer and fasting when asked how to best serve Christ, Reprobus answered that would be unable to comply with either of those tasks. The hermit reasoned due his size and strength he could please Christ by helping people ford a treacherous river. One day after many successful and easy crossings, a young boy sought passage with the burden becoming almost too much to bear and the river difficult to trudge across, the rapids becoming leaden around his legs. After the arduous journey, the passenger revealed himself to be Christ his king, whom was well served by this work. The ferryman henceforth was known as Christopher (Χριστόφορος, the Christ-bearer), ultimately beheaded in Lycia for his evangelising and refusing to sacrifice to the local pagan gods. Patron saint of Baden, Mecklenburg and Braunschweig, Rab in Croatia, Vilnius, Riga and St Kitts, Christopher is also the protector of athletes, mariners and travellers, as well as invoked as an intercessor against sudden death (owing to the dangerous river-crossing) an toothaches. This spurious association comes from a donation of a supposed relic in the form of a giant moral to a group of friars in the Piedmontese town of Vercelli in the late Middle Ages. Described by one of the numerous pilgrims seeking relief over centuries, the silver and gold reliquary as dena molaris pugno major (a tooth bigger than a fist), the inheriting order of the Barnabites had the attraction examined scientifically in the late eighteenth century and was determined to have belonged to a hippopotamus. The object was summarily deaccessioned and forbidden to be treated with idolatry. The community apparently keeps the tooth out of public view as a curiosity in their monastery.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the death of Twitter (with synchronoptica) plus AI and dragnet surveillance

seven years ago: a Tagalong word for overwhelming cuteness plus an act to prevent pernicious political activities

eight years ago: acts of terrorism across Europe, visiting Château d’Oléron, a coup in Turkey, presidential commercial interests, colouring black and white photos per algorithm, lanterns of the dead plus punditry in America

nine years ago: a Venus flytrap, assorted links worth revisiting plus Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Cologne

eleven years ago: the frequency illusion

der lehrpfad der unholdigen personen (10. 650)

In the forest of the municipality of Salzhaff in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern on the coast of the Baltic, colloquially known as the ‘Arschlochwandelweg,” there is a mile-long sculpture trail featuring six, life-sized bronzes of George W Bush, Erich Honecker, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Nikita Khrushchev and Donald Trump. On private property but freely accessible to the public, the owner choose to have a rogues gallery of the unkind and inept but did not want evil figures like Hitler and Stalin. A commission was put in for the addition of Vladimir Putin but was ultimately rejected by a Polish foundry due to the neighbouring war.

bundeskanzlerin

First entering politics in the Revolutions of 1989 as deputy spokesperson for the first and only (independent) democratically elected East German government of Lothar de Maizière, then elected following reunification as a Bundestag representative for Mecklenburg-Vorpommern with several ministerial appointments under Helmut Kohl, Angela Merkel was elevated to General Secretary of her political party, the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) in 1998, succeeding Gerhard Schröder in 2005 after the outcome of federal elections installed a collation among the CDU, its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) as Chancellor of Germany on this day. Elected to an unprecedented four terms in high office—considered by many the de facto leader of the European Union and since America’s dereliction in 2016 of the free world, Merkel announced she would stand down in October 2018 and not seek a fifth term in 2021.

meck dec day

Drafted by the patriotic, separatist county Committee on Safety on this day in 1775 and adopted by the same organisation at the end of the month, the Mecklenburg Resolves, whilst falling short of an actual declaration of independence from Great Britain by the colony of North Carolina, the list of grievances did reject the authority of crown and parliament, and were transmogrified over the decades and romanticised as a break with England that preceded the United States’ declaration by over a year.
Though no longer celebrated as a state holiday (regrettably North Carolina also selected this anniversary in 1861 to secede from the Union and join the Confederacy) and not brought to light until republication forty-four years after the fact much to the consternation and scepticism Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson whom by dint of similarity of language and tone might have been accused of plagiarism or cribbing—in fact accused of doing so by John Adams, the date is referenced on both the state flag and seal (see also here and here) not without some enduring controversy regarding the authenticity of the claim and tarnish on the Founding Father. The second date April 12 th 1776 refers to the Halifax Resolves of a neighbouring county whose historic legitimacy are better attested

down runter

An interesting featured article ostensibly on an army recruitment campaign imploring Australian colonists to fight for metropolitan Britain during World War I re-introduces us to the broader, meticulous and vast curation of unusual maps by Big Think contributor Frank Jacobs.
Like many in the collection, the propaganda illustrated on this broadsheet evokes the it could happen here trope with the continent rebranded as New Germany—with Kaisermania just off the southern coast. Ironically, as this sort of panic was not firmly ensconced in the realm of possibilities with the Great War being one of attrition, the outposts that Imperial Germany had in the vicinity of Australia were immediately taken by New Zealand and Australian forces as soon as war was declared, rebranding Neu-Mecklenburg and Neu-Pommern as New Ireland and New England respectively. The Treaty of Versailles formally stripped Germany of its colonial holdings and with Africa and Asia already unduly apportioned among the other European powers, the only land left up for grabs for a resurgent Nazi Germany was Antarctica.

castle week: mecklenberg-vorpommern

The German Castle Route, the Burgenstraße, cuts a swath, intersected by other scenic routes, like the Romantic, Romanesque and the Half-Timbered Roads and others, from Mannheim on the banks of the Neckar River to Prague. I notice that a lot of our travels swarm around such trails. There are, however, many more hits off these main sequences.

We had a very nice holiday enjoying the Baltic beaches and natural wonders of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern with the islands of Rügen and Usedom. The resorts and hotels fronting the shoreline and promenades were very picturesque and inviting whitewashed affairs, but we also had a chance to discover some more inland sites.

Sadly many traditional castles in the region are in sore need of care and have been more or less abandoned—though there has been renewed interest in such real-estate and preservation efforts. Crumbling castles are basically free to a good home. But not all was in disrepair and there were quite a few very nice manor houses and plantation estates, just beyond the sand dunes. Situated next to a grove of thousand year old oak trees (Eiche), the Baroque collection of buildings at Ivenack with castle and cloister. With a commanding view of island and lands beyond, the Granitz Hunting Lodge (Jagdschloss) is very impressive site.

A winding cast iron staircase hugs the tower walls and from the vantage point of the roof one is afforded a spectacular and strategic view of the former royal hunting grounds, now protected as a nature reserve. The tower also has a staggering collection of hunting rifles and trophies—contributions from the many guests entertained and hunting parties hosted. The state government invested a lot of funds to rehabilitate this building and turn it into a popular tourist-attraction, and hopefully this act can inspire the public to do more to save the region’s other historic, cultural, and natural wonders.