a scanner darkly

The colour background that one sees when one closes one’s eyes is called Eigengrau (German for intrinsically gray) and is brighter than what we perceive as the blackest black because there’s no contrast behind our eyelids.
The term was coined by experimental psychologist Gustav Theodor Fechner in the 1860s while working at the University of Leipzig whilst studying the relationship between sensation and perception, famously recognising that not everyone will see the same colours as demonstrated by contemporary and toy-maker Charles Benham with his top. Just as the Eigengrau that people report is hard to measure and is subjective, the subtle arcs of colour (called Fechner colours or flicker colours) are not the same for every observer—and no one can quite say why. The flashing image might make some people dizzy, so click here to view it. What colour are the tracers that you see? Is it the same for this one (caution flashing images) too?

alt-right or barrel of deplorables

Here’s a brief biographical look of some of the freshly be(k)nighted members of European Alt-Right, coming soon to an election near you—you know, so you can avoid awkward encounters at parties. Thankfully, most have a day-job to fall back on—since idle hands... With the exception of the do-over election in Austria, this dossier only introduces those without some tenuous claim to authority.

Frauke Petry, chemist and chairwoman for Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, founded 4 July 2015.





Lutz Bachmann, advertising executive from Dresden and founder of the PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident) October 2014.



Marine Le Pen, attorney and French politician and president of Front National, October 1972.

Albert Rösti, political consultant and national chairman of the Swiss People’s Party, founded September 1971.





Geert Wilders, Dutch founder and leader of the Party for Freedom, February 2006.











Matteo Salvini, Italian journalist and leader of separatist movement Lega Nord, founded in January 1991.








Norbert Hofer, contested president of Austria and member of the Freedom Party (FPÖ), founded April 1956.

glass menagerie or radial symmetry

Hyperalleric invites us on a field-trip that they’ve helped to curate themselves to the Corning Glass Museum to marvel at the exhibit of antique glass models of deep sea creatures—tube worms, squid, corals and anemones—crafted in a nineteenth century workshop in Dresden from the stacks and storerooms of Cornell University, having acquired a sizable amount of them in the late 1800s for instruction in marine biology.
The glass-workers were quite skilled and came from a long line of artists, and in response to wide-spread interest in natural history at the time, turned their attention away from jewelry (though having gotten quite talented at making glass eyes for taxidermists) and tried to accurately capture the look of these delicate specimens that usually disintegrate once taken out of their native environment. The gorgeous creations were shelved and forgotten with the advent of photography, and later rediscovered and mended—nearly as fragile as the invertebrates they represent, displayed not just as other-worldly chandeliers and beautiful baubles but also studied as record (a novel sort of fossil) of the loss of biodiversity in the oceans over the ensuing century and a half.

trümmerfrau

The secretive Bilderberg Group will be meeting at an undisclosed location in Dresden, as Quartz reports, this week, and although proceedings are not subject to public-scrutiny in any sense, apparently one item of their agenda will be the so-called precariat.
Coined by economist Guy Standing, the term refers to the working-class suspended in a precarious situation—not rightly any longer called the proletariat since they were afforded more protections and securities—unsure whether they can enjoy continued employment or face redundancy, replaced by immigrants or robots. Siding with the author’s take on this anxiety-causing arrangement in the labour-force, I agree that the lizard-people who rule the world will be rather aghast with what their underlings are facing and what kind of toll this takes on society.

amenities oder unterkunft

Over the weekend, H and I got a chance to dine at the oldest guesthouse in the storied and venerable city of Leipzig. 
The institution that eventually became famous, as widely known as Leipzig’s other famous restaurant Auerbachs Keller or the Hofbräuhaus of München, as Thüringer Hof came into existence in the early fifteenth century as the urban estate of the rector of the University of Leipzig (a Freihaus as such in town residences are called was exempt from city tax although it was afforded the protection of the city wall) who in 1466, realised that there was a significant market gap when it came to feeding and sheltering students—especially until they were sponsored by fraternal societies.
The rector opened up a corner of his home as a public-house—doing a brisk business for over six centuries, with just a few interruptions.

Multiple dining halls could accommodate some twelve hundred guests and the establishment was known to the likes of Martin Luther, Bach, whose home-church and choir are just around the corner (along with another less famed watering-hole, but I liked the name, nonetheless) and Richard Wagner.

tatort oder der kommissar’s in town

Though truthfully I cannot say I consider myself a dedicated fan of the series—though I usually have it on in the background and make it a point to gyrate to the funky opening soundtrack—I think that I must give it another go after reading Dangerous Minds’ appreciation of Tatort, a crime-scene investigatory franchise that has regular parallel plot-lines in a dozen different cities within the German Sprachraum. The series has aired for four decades presently and its thousandth instalment is coming up soon. The tribute highlights some of the best episodes and offers a lucid explanation to the nonpareil format to outside audiences—however much we might already fancy ourselves forensics experts thanks to CSI and Law & Order. I have caught glimpses of familiar sights in the show’s extensive venues, especially Leipzig, beforehand—and although a recent chapter was filmed between Frankfurt and Wiesbaden, I was a little let down that Wiesbaden’s screen-presence was severely limited and confined to an underground carpark—though I could be reasonably certain I recognised it.

gasworks gallery

The ever inquisitive Nag on the Lake has a nice vignette about the creative repurposing of the elegant, Victorian girders of the Pancras Gasholder to frame a nice park in London, which reminded me of the Gasometers we’ve encountered reinvented and venues for a wide variety of displays.

Not a meter but rather a container, like a water tower (which are also beautiful works of architecture), the function of these mammoth structures was to store a large volume of natural gas in situ ready for local use—to power gas lighting originally and then for heating. When more and more gasworks became redundant (though some are still in use in many areas for balancing pressure), municipalities faced challenges in reclaiming the real estate as the business was a dirty one but there are quite a few notable and creative solutions that incorporate the original casing, like apartment blocks in Vienna, or rather famously the Gasometer of Leipzig, which now hosts a visual panorama (das Panometer) that displays—across a huge canvas of some thirty meters by one hundred meters, the largest photographs in the world, accented by light and sound effects and sweeping vistas.

the devil and the deep blue sea

If you have not yet treated yourself to the absolutely edifying oblectation of Futility Closet series of podcasts, I strongly recommend you began with their latest instalment on the forgotten story of gentleman merchant raider of World War I, Felix Graf von Luckner. This swash-buckling villain has been overshadowed by other semi-legendary figures of the time—like the Red Baron, but was turned hero for his humanity and persecuting war without causalities. Posing as a Norwegian logging vessel, Luckner’s captained his crew of privateers in a somewhat anchronistic sailing ship called the Seeadler through the supply lines of the Atlantic, confounding materiel delivery and treating his hostages as friends—a sentiment that was reciprocated, but that’s only the barest outline of the tale. It’s definitely worth working backwards as well to catch up on all the engrossing episodes.

5x5

straβenverkkehrsordnung: a unique roadway configuration and the technicalities of traffic regulations means that one stop light has been red for three decades in Dresden

over the rainbow: MOMA acquires the pride flag and interviews the seamstress

four thousand holes in blackburn, lancashire: internet giant is checking computer reading-comprehension with conservative, sensational tabloids

electric babysitter: artist captures images of her children in listless, powerful moments of watching TV

raptor squat: honest-to-goodness zookeepers re-enacting pose from new Jurassic World

present and perdurant

Though modern Greek has adopted a more straightforward term to convey happiness, ευτυχία—just suggesting good works—the classical term Eudæmonia is fortunately still around with all its mysterious and internecine intrigues.
The greatest minds are unable to come to a consensus on what constitutes happiness (or whether that’s even a question worthy of pursuit), but I have to wonder if even the first interlocutors really knew what was meant by Eudæmonia. Semantics are of course important considerations and flourishing or thriving might be a better word than our emotionally-laden happiness—the Romans rendered it as felicitas, who was also sometimes deified, but I don’t believe that any translation could capture the sense of being a role-model compounded with a guardian angel or fairy godmother figure like the original Greek. One achieves happiness, it’s argued, by emulating the example of that demon—dæmons just being spirits, familiars or lesser deities and not diabolical ones. The nature of those qualities and whether there’s some universal imperative are hopeless elusive, though that does not mean we shouldn’t bother. Furthermore, one’s level of bliss can be impacted retroactively should one’s present deportment cause him or her to earn a bad reputation after death.
Thinking about these rarefied ideas in general and particularly the last bit that invokes the directionality of time makes me turn back to the novel I am currently enjoying, Jo Walton’s absolutely amazing Just City—wherein the goddess Athena gathers the prescribed youth from all ages in order to experimentally create the utopia of Plato’s Republic overseen by those who’ve prayed for wisdom. I wonder if one’s eudæmon isn’t more of a conflicted personality, like shoulder angels. The cover of the Walton’s book, incidentally, focusses in on a particular section of this larger famous fresco by Raphael—showing students engaged on the steps of the Academy below. The different elements and possible perspectives in this work of art makes me think about another of Raphael’s masterpieces, the Sistine Madonna, who’s two puti reflecting upward has become a better known detail. H and I got to see it in its entirety in Dresden once. The aforementioned fresco, however, is out of public view in the papal apartments but I recalled the style and how the tableaux extended beyond the frame, preceding into the background, as the image that was on our ticket stubs from the Vatican Museum—the ephemera buried behind too many layers of our bulletin board to excavate, just now. I don’t believe I am any closer to the being able to articulate what happiness is but do feel I’ve gone on a little trip in time just now myself.

alles gute zum geburtstag!

Although it’s notoriously, happily difficult to pin down the founding date of human settlements—happily as it allows residents to celebrate the anniversary multiple times, marking legendary or actuarial mention, I am certainly siding with this warm birthday tribute to Leipzig from Deutsch Welle that honours all the highlights of this fair city. When Leipzig was first documented by a church chronicler a thousand years ago as urbs Libzi—the city among the lime trees—there surely must have already been a sizable population and significant commercial activity there for some time, which archaeological evidence attests to. H and I are well acquainted with this storied city and its surroundings and here (Augusteum, Plagwitz, Monument to the Battle of the Nations, Leipziger Zoological Gardens, Weihnachtsmarkt, Russian Orthodox Church) are just a selection of past impressions.

der natur auf der spur oder welcome to the monkey-house

Over the weekend, H and I had the chance to take a safari through the storied and thoroughly progressive zoological gardens of Leipzig, about time too as we have been coming to the city regularly for year now.
Founded for the indemnifying of the public in 1878, the menagerie has expanded immensely in the last couple of decades as has the zoo’s mission for conservation and education.

Within the vastness of the traditional range (though there is nothing mundane about the innovative enclosures) that recreates the habitat of the happy captives as best as possible, there is an indoors core called Gondwanaland that captured the primordial supercontinent in a hot-house environment host to an amazing botanical, hanging garden home to free-range monkeys and birds and dozens of aquaria, madials and terrariums that represent the sort of evolutionary survivors, malingerers that might have populated the pre-tectonic world.
There was also expertly and exotically landscaped lagoons of flamingos, an expansive serengeti, a temple for elephants and many other installations (including ones featuring biomes closer to home) with amenities and little intrusion from those who come to gawk.
The zoo was no amusement park ride, nor side-show attraction but rather a powerful, interactive lesson in diversity and amazing adaptability of life that really confronts one with the vulnerability of our quirkiest, most-specialised cousins.
One of the most popular daily soap operas in Germany profiles resident animals and their caretakers and is broadcast from here every afternoon.  The whole day was hardly long enough for a proper visit and hope to come back soon to learn more.

rex mundi or spirits in the material world

The massacre of the Cathars in Europe—particularly in their bastions of southern France is not just a historical curiosity, a footnote or something merely comparable with the ongoing plight and persecution of the Yazidi under contemporary righteous bullies and deserves much more of a mention than a few lines sandwiched between the more well-known campaigns of the Children’s Crusades and the Reconquista. What little that is known for certain about the beliefs and traditions of people grouped under the name Cathar, which means pure one but may have been applied in the pejorative sense to a whole spectrum of individuals with unorthodox tenets, is scant and suspect since it was chronicled by those who sought to exterminate heresy in all its forms. A few common accusations of the inquisitors sketches at least a faint outline of the framework of their belief—the dichotomy between the material and spiritual world, which are the handiwork of distinct gods, the former faulty, evil and covetous and the later perfection, goodness and love, and born to the dual nature of mind and body, they believed that they were duty-bound (as reflected by their manner of worship) to try to reconcile this dual-nature through a series of reincarnation until finally pure, having elevated and shed that physical form.

With procreation seen as a way of perpetuating the cycles of death and re-birth, marriage was generally eschewed and couples practiced birth-control. As anyone might be reborn as anything, there was not the usual denigration of women and most of the sects practiced vegetarianism. Naturally, such beliefs were dangerous and subversive, as the community scoffed the authority of the Church, and while they believed that Jesus was a good man with admirable qualities and a prophet, the Cathars found it ridiculous to believe that a saviour would be made incarnate. Secular authority was questionable too, appealing as it did to the divine right of kings.
For decades, missionaries were sent into the Balkans, where the faith had probably originated, and into parts of southern France and Italy to try to reform the Cathars—but seeing no conversions for all their efforts and with the needed catalyst came in the form of murdered papal delegate, accompanied by Saint Dominic, and perhaps more pointedly, the tacit permission to sack Byzantium, a twenty-year long purge, called the Albigensian Crusade (named for the arch-diocese of Albi, which was in the centre of Cathar country), was launched to rid Languedoc of Cathar influences. Of course, frustrated clerics and nobles welcomed themselves to the spoils of the auto-de-fay. The story of this persecution, however, is an even greater crime than mankind generally unleashes on his own kind in that, like the destruction of Constantinople in terms of learning and culture lost to the world, the region that was home to most of the Cathars prior to the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Aude praire with the cities of Carcassonne, Narbonne, Perpignan, Nîmes, Toulouse and Avignon, was probably the chief contender for the most refined and advanced territory in all of medieval Europe—everything in between Ireland (with its monasteries, which were also irritants for the Church but remote enough to be left alone) and said Constantinople—which now toppled, exposed Europe to incursions from the Mongols and Ottomans.

Hints of this cultivation remain in the architectural tradition but little else, as the genocide was nearly total. Anecdotally at least, this indiscriminate slaughter was the source of the saying, paraphrased, “Kill ‘em all and let God sort them out.” Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. Pockets endured in the most remote rural areas and Cathar communities were also incorporated into other sects of outliers, the new Protestants and the Moravian (Herrenhuter) of the German woodlands. On a lighter note, happily an international café chain affords us the opportunity to reflect and share our experiences with gnosticism and the Albigensian Crusade by branding the avatar of the dread and almighty Abraxas on all their merchandise.

cowboys and indians: sophomoric or dress right dress

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 Adémar 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.

Denmark and England also answered the call, and being apparently blown off course, landed in Portugal and began the Reconquista of Moorish-held lands there and throughout Spain. Saxon elements of the armies of Conrad III, emperor of the Germans and accompanied by his nephew Barbarossa, took it upon themselves to overrun their Slavic neighbours, who had up until now adhered to the pagan religion and converted them—to death. What was meant to be the sole thrust, the French, was on the march, but the plan to have the crusade under the leadership of the regent—as opposed to the princes, a bunch of poor-relations, usually without holdings of their own and ambitious, was not really playing out as expected. Eleanor of Aquitaine insisted she be allow to come along as well, and her eagerness inspired many other queens and princesses to join up too. Eleanor and her retainers even sported fancy battle-dress, agee white steeds with white cloaks and red leather boots. Had one been available, I am sure Eleanor would have had a unicorn as her mount. The same problems of petty intrigues and alliances that sacrificed larger goals, however, plagued this mission as much and more at times than the first, and an almost complete reversal transpired, causing most of the commanders to retreat to their respective homelands.
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 à 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.

I wonder if Eleanor had that effect on men. The couple had eight children, whom, honestly unruly, Eleanor and ex-husband Louis VII in sort of a cold war with the English king played against Henry II, who in response kept his wife under house-arrest for a the last decade of his life. Eleanor, reaching an advanced age but active until the end, maintained a key role as regent, ruling in her sons’ names while they were away on campaigns, including the wicked and lazy King John (of Robin Hood lore but who really was made to sign the Magna Carta and limit his own power) and Richard Lionheart, who will play a key role in the next Crusade.

touchstones oder sonderweg

The years from 1806 to 1815 marked some of the darkest times for the kingdom and more peculiar holdings of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, as armies of Napoleon ravaged the lands, spanning from the surrender of most of the nobility, the summoning of the secular and ecclesiastical powers of the realm to pledge allegiance to the conquering French in Vienna, until Waterloo, and called into question the survival of Germany as a coherent culture. Retreating to the ancestral city of Königsburg (the modern-day Russian exclave of Kaliningrad) on the Baltic, the royal house of Prussia, the only major kingdom that did not capitulate to the French—and for that saw their lands redistributed and further reparations that exacted too much, the duke instituted many measures to build solidarity, patriotic privation and sacrifice and gave his subjects a waft of equality and egalitarianism which sustained the people through victory and the rebuild and the reorganisation that seemed to be deferred for nearly a generation.
Democratic reforms elsewhere in Europe—including France, culminated in 1848 in Frankfurt am Main with a Constitutional Convention, which rejected the decimated gerrymandering of the former Empire, from some three-hundred fifty quasi-independent states to a confederation of a mere thirty-seven, as not being representative of the people. This revolution, though uniting and healing and never quite killed, did rather die on the vine, with Prussia and other regional powers tossing out democratic ideals, feeling that they had served their purpose and were in the environment of security and renewed prosperity were dangerous and subversive.
In the two years, however, that a united and republican Germany prevailed—not to be taken up again until after the defeat and horrors of World War I in the short-lived Weimar Republic—convened under the auspices of the Bauhaus Movement, in an opera house like the Frankfurt summit in a church, a few trappings and symbols that were destined to return were popularised:
the German tri-colour of gold, black and red (supposedly inspired by the uniforms that a group of resistance fighters worn during the Napoleonic Wars) and without the insignia of any particular royal-holding but rather of the people was briefly flown, and the German national anthem was sung. “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles,” was not a lyric of dominance but rather a plea for an end to Kleinstaaterei and internal division, though now replaced with the excusable and admirable trinity of Einigheit und Recht und Freiheit (Unity, Rule of Law and Freedom) originally extolled in the third verse.  These events were not an abortive revolution but rather sentiments that came before their times.  One other premature development came about this same year, with social scientists and agitators Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels first publishing a thin pamphlet in Köln called the Manifesto of the Communist Party (Manifest der kommunistischen Partei) which described all of history as class-struggles, but this too garnered little attention at the time.

sturm und drang oder elective affinities

Though mostly doing the responsible thing and honouring his father’s wishes for him to study law, Johann von Goethe really of course wanted to pursue Oriental studies (Islam and the Arabic language being two subjects that fascinated him throughout his life) but grudgingly left his patrician home in the Free Imperial City of Frankfurt am Main to go to the University of Leipzig. There, Goethe fell in with some influential Bohemian types and while his grades suffered, he was did find inspiration in one students’ pub for his re-telling of Faust that would take torturing decades more to realise. These first few semesters were quite productive for Goethe, having gotten into the practise of churning out experimental short plays and poetry on a regular basis.  Either because Goethe himself was too harsh a critic, however, or because they really were sophomoric works, few survived from that early period. Waxing dissolute and not doing so well in school, Goethe returned home to Frankfurt and eventually remarshaled his resolve to again take up his studies, but this time in Strasbourg.
Although the land of Alsace had been in possession of the French Empire, annexed from the Holy Roman Empire, for more than a century in this most recent in a long chain of redrawing borders, there still was a large German student population at the illustrious university and the city’s architecture and high spires of its cathedral—though somewhat mistakenly—struck Goethe as quintessentially German but not in the nationalistic sense (there was no Germany, just a loose confederation of city-states, petty kingdoms and imperial monasteries with varying degrees of allegiance to the Emperor) but rather as a community united in language, in the artistic sense as well as the spoken word. Goethe became particularly keen on this notion, drawing from his own childhood experiences being educated with a very liberal curriculum that included the classics and world literature, and finding more and more frustration and dissatisfaction with his own writing projects—as meaning and passion seemed to retreat from his poems (overtures to one young mistress especially) the more he applied himself.

In Strasbourg, Goethe saw his horizons broaden and the literary world unfurled before him when he was introduced to the plays and sonnets of one bard called William Shakespeare, and found in Shakespeare’s free-wheeling and bold manner the conventions that he sought for own prose. Back at the family home, the prodigal son celebrated his first love fest to the Bard and his muse with a “Shakespeare Day” on 14 October with some of his classmates. Goethe’s family saw no harm in their son’s renewed interest in writing, as his marks had improved and would be allowed to open a small practise in first in Frankfurt then in Wetzlar. His career as a lawyer, however, was destined to be a short one—Goethe often courting contempt by demanding clemency for clients and more enlightened, progressive laws. Perhaps sensing that this was the wrong vocation or perhaps because of his moonlighting, Goethe worked extensively on his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers)—a semi-autobiographical account of a failed love affair told in correspondence and climaxing in the anti-hero’s suicide. The novel was an instant sensation and helped to propel, just as Shakespeare had done for English, German into the pantheon of literary and scholarly languages. Though not the stylings of emo or goth, young men were dressing as Werther (Werther-Fieber it was called) and tragically, there were some urged to the same ending after reading the book—and not just in Germany but all over. Fearing the dangerous influence that this potentially subversive work might have if the international celebrity might be allowed to spread unabated, a writer and publisher called Christoph Friedrich Nikolai from Frankfurt an der Oder, in central Prussia, went so far as to give the story a Hollywood ending, under the title “The Joys of Young Werther.”
Napoleon was a committed fan as were many others. The political discontinuity that charaterised the Holy Roman Empire was a grave subject of consternation to outsiders, who lived under more centralised governments, but as the city-states of an equally fractious Italy during the Renaissance encouraged the arts through patronage—every little lord wanting to retain pet talent, the same sort of arrangement could be fostered in Germany, and Goethe’s book caught the attention of one young heir-apparent to the small but grand duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. This enlightened ruler ennobled Goethe—putting the von in his name—and kept him on in Weimar for the rest of his life.
The young duke was of the same line who had two-hundred fifty years earlier had the courage and the wherewithal to provide sanctuary in the Wartburg by Eisenach to another controversial figure, Martin Luther—whereas in a more unified society with no place to seek refuge, like France or England, the Reformer would have been burnt at the stake for heresy. Goethe held a number of royal offices through his career, which afforded him travel on diplomatic missions throughout Europe and experiences Goethe could not have otherwise obtained, meeting many other contemporary luminaries—while not infringing on his writing and scientific studies. Goethe was deeply interested in all facets of existence and was absolutely prodigious in many fields, having amassed the largest mineral collections in Europe, published several seminal treatises on botany, optics and anatomy (which included some inspiring observations that Charles Darwin took to heart), and meteorology (researching the forecasting nature of barometric pressure) among others.

broadsheet

This past year was certainly a banner one for anniversaries and centenaries marked the world over, and it seems as if the trend is hardly escapable since we’re survivors of history’s dreadful-excellent heap of memory.
It is a good thing surely not to forget to celebrate what we’ve achieved and overcome but this whole movement to propagrandise and make, especially a century’s passing, a moment of national pride and a rallying-cause happened in 1617—one hundred years after reformer Martin Luther famously nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberger Dom and sparked the era of Protestantism, masterfully captured in this poster with quite a bit of allegory to study, like a political cartoon. Of course, this stand is celebrated every year—peacefully and surely Luther does not endorse the use of his likeness for this campaign message, on 1 November, but apolitically. Mass distribution of this broadsheet—and Luther’s Bible, were made possible by newly introduced printing technologies and the Princes of Prussia certainly were not going to let the date go by without some manipulative media. Clashing forces of the Lutherans and the counter-Reformist Catholic lands in a fractured Holy Roman Empire quickly escalated—especially with sentiments fueled on both sides by caricature and fear-mongering, and led to the Thirty Years War, which was one of the darkest and bloodiest wars of European history Christian sectarianism. I hope that we don’t need our memory jarred with new violence for old.

like a picture print from currier and ives

As the fourth Advent comes rolling in, here are a few scenes from Christmas markets in Wiesbaden, Leipzig and Erfurt to celebrate the season. PfRC wishes you all good cheer, be kind to one another, and thanks for visiting.