aughts and überlieferte

A few months ago, H found a gorgeous hard-bound programme documenting and profiling the Oberammergau Passion Play of 1910, and later I spied a copy of the booklet from the 1922 performance. The tradition of staging an extravagant passion play that everyone in the community takes part in dates back to 1633, when blighted by plague and failing crops, village elders pledged to commit to such a spectacle once a decade, should the villagers be spared. That tradition has continued, this notable delays, ever since—most recently in 2010. The two programmes may have been printed as keepsakes for different audiences and it really does not matter about the poshness of the leaflets, though the bound edition with photographs and illustrations is very different from the other, text only on whitey-brown paper—just that the show does go on, but after looking at the two together and wondering about the twelve year span, it was fascinating to compare the decades of each performance and the changing times. The 1900s saw much upheaval with the last days of colonization—with Cuba and the Philippines becoming independent from the US, the home-rule moves of Ireland and Norway, assassinations and conflicts, the discovery of radiation, the pioneering of powered, and the first time practical availability of products like automobiles, cameras, typewriters, gramophones and recorded music. The next presentation came, postponed due to the end of the war and unsteady peace that followed, with a very much transformed backdrop—not played to an audience subject to the German Empire but rather before a new Republic. Stemming from the outbreak of war that dissolved most monarchies and empires, the aftermath hosted revolutions in Russia and China and the pandemic outbreak of the Spanish Flu that illustrated for the first time how the deployment and displacement of millions can spread disease. Aside from infernal engines and motion pictures, however, there was not the social engineering that occurred previously with the dissemination of the way people moved and communicated. It is as if, unable to fully digest what mobility and voice (in the form of suffrage too) for the public would mean, the dynasties themselves revolted terribly, and the season’s run for the Passion Play was witness to the whole awful mutiny being set in motion again. One can also see the transition from an Art Nouveau to an Art Déco style with the cover designs. I wonder if there are other such time-capsules, intersections between promise and custom and contemporary influences (not quite the same as ephemera nor like the regular business of historians either), and how such treasures are researched and held in regard.

champagne socialism or better than an poke in the eye with a sharp stick

There is no real equivalent to the municipal banking establishments found in Germany elsewhere: these foundations operate like credit unions locally, under the stewardship of and partly owned by the city or country, but with a national presence and reciprocation and profits that the union realizes is returned to the host community in the form of financial support for charitable causes and civic institutions. In stark contrast to private banks that are at odds with governments and central banks over policy and how to best smear the economy with credit to sustain market activity, the Sparkassen Verband is rather flush with money right now and not too parsimonious about lending. People, I think, feel good about parking their money there and the competition of this state-backed entity also probably serves to keep private banks in check as well, since in Germany there seems to be less antagonism between the government and wholly private lenders and investors and more discipline.

Various (temporary) touts and lures are employed by the private banks to attract customers with offers of a better return with interest and more free services—which is the mark of a healthy and responsible rivalry, and there’s no subtle message of guilt transmitted nor desperate attacks of a government-supported cartel and unfairness exchanged between the two systems. Animosity, at least, is not in the open.  Neither one is totally beyond reproach or perfect, but both serve to keep the other in check. Aside from charity and public projects, a small percentage of the earnings go back into the consortium for advertising and for renovations for their franchise. My local branch celebrated its grand-opening after redoing their interior to include fully automated services and a posh entryway like the lobby of a theatre, giving out bottles of champagne (Sekt) to everyone that came by. I can’t imagine getting more than a calendar or maybe a toaster from any private institution and only for opening a new account—that is, save the grief, uncertainty and questionable loyalty which are offered freely.

mendeleev or unnilversum

For inquiring minds, the type face that closely approximates the style featured bright and bold on academic posters of the periodic table is the Univers family (not in the standard quiver of fonts but downloaded for free here). Of course, there’s no universal standards for the heraldry of such a chart, but such achieving such a look, with a little nostalgia for the high school science classroom and cleanly monolithic, I think is a fitting way to display the octaves of the Elements—sort of like musical notation itself. The strangeness of particles that underlies the noble appearance of the Atom have so far defied such an immediate and tidy composition, like being ordered according to periods whose gaps were realized, filled in, and known before the missing elements were even discovered. A framework of theories were affirmed, stepwise, with the zoo of subatomic entities and mannerisms that were also predicted and discovered one by one—suggesting that something a bit unwieldy may yet also be described or describable in human understanding. Maybe the whole range of fonts and type-setting displays a certain periodicity as well but there is always space for variation and to wedge style between style.

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cactus is our friend, he will point out the way

The prickly pear or paddle cactus has sprouted dozens of hands and continues to grow. With each new bud, I speculate whether it is a fig blooming or another new appendage, and the cactus spreads. The scientific name for the genus is Opuntia, after the Greek settlement of the Locrian tribe. The Homeric figure of Patroclus was from this region and forty black ships assailed Troy from here under the leadership of Ajax. This cactus is a new world species, from Mexico, but does thrive in the Mediterranean as well. I don’t see the connection between our brave little cactus and the Iliad but other new world oddities, like the strange Echidna of Australia, after the mother of all monsters in Hesiod’s Theogony, are given fanciful old world designations, as well as wholly newly discovered worlds. According to some traditions, though, one of the hundred-handed giants, the Hekatonkheires (the Centimani in Latin), lived in the surrounding region of Euboea, where the Locri were located, as challenger for Poseidon for control of the Aegean, the monster having invented the warship to further his claim by proxy. I could imagine the resemblance there and an inventive etymology.

registratrix or public-record

While the rest of Europe and in particular the people of Germany and Italy were enthralled by the football match between these two titans for a place in the finals, it seems there was some conscientious division of focus in the quiet and abandoned halls of the lower house (the Bundestag) of parliament: with no debate or discussion, members present passed a bill that included reforms to the municipal registration process (declaring one’s residence, registering a vehicle, family-status, background, religion, etc.) allowing local authorities, the Rathaus, financial offices, immigration and naturalization officials, to sell information to presumably marketers without the knowledge or permission of the individuals in the registry. As soon as this shady vote came to light, it has been roundly disowned and disavowed by the government and the media, pledging that the changes will never even make it to the upper house of parliament (the Bundesrat). Though perhaps such intelligence and demographic-information could be easily gleaned from other, public sources (without remanding anything to the village treasurer), such a proposal deserves outrage and further scrutiny. News and legislation does not stay buried forever and I would hope that the reforms’ advocates would realize that this was bound to surface and upset a lot of people, even if the fatal-flaw of the democratic-process is such to guarantee suffrage for all and brings all sorts of nonsense to the table.

 It is not so much, however, the worlds’-dumbest-criminals aspect of trying to use the gladiator-games as a cover that is revolting, but rather the complete disdain they demonstrated for their constituencies. Surely someone at some point put them in office, as a position of trust to represent and protect public interests—and no paying demographer will be willing to offer up so much money as to fund all community works, if that was their reasoning, even if it was theirs to give away. Also, as I understand it, this dispute reform is only one part of a larger initiative to annex some registration responsibilities from the Länder and centralize it within the federal (Bundes) government, so localities might see no revenue from such scheme. People not only have a right to be forgot and to decline but also should have control and oversight in how their vital data is traded. In an environment where the populace is constantly mobilized against the whack-a-mole series of assaults on internet freedoms, privacy rights and blanched at surveillance for whatever purpose, it is quite a dissonance to imagine the government to profit from such measures.

ingénue and konkurrenz

The Iron Curtain created some interesting parallels among products and services, like the Soviet answers to the Concorde and the NASA Space Shuttle, which unfortunately was never launched due to the end of the Cold War and break-up of the Soviet Union. In divided Germany, I think the pressure to provide consumers with market analogues was especially piquant. There are food and cleaning products that still demand a high level of distinction and brand-loyalty, though the closed economies that fostered their separate identities has not existed in more than two decades. Automobiles were too a cultural aspect governed by scarcity over abundance, embarrassment of choices and ingenuity. Having loved and cared for an old Volkswagen T3, it was with more insight and respect that I could meet again its DDR counterpart: from 1961 until 1991, Barkas was the sole manufacturer of service trucks, vans and minibuses. Like its western equivalent and forebearers, these vehicles came in a huge array of different models, tailored for public and private use, as postal trucks and garbage kips and other public utilities and even, I understand, as roving paddy-wagons by the Stasi when on the prowl for thought-criminals (but I think that the fleet and compliment of B-1000s was mostly associated with caravaning and public-works), and with an equally robust and technically accessible engine. The artefacts of isolation are interesting things and the convergent determination and engineering are impressive.