I've recently moved offices, so as I set up my new crucible of habitual effectiveness (ha!) I've been looking for something to edutain me in the background. That's when I stumbled upon Gresham College's free lecture series, which started in 1597 and has been online since 1721.
Here are two most edifying lectures, one on the medieval hospital, one on the creation of illuminated manuscripts. Both are delivered in flawless received pronunciation by immaculately-coiffed English -- well, I want to say MILFs, but that's just the Yank crudeness in me. Let's call them gentlewomen.
Poem, a 2004 movie by Ralf Schmerberg that I watched for the first time last night on DVD, consists of dramatized recitations of 19 German poems from Goethe onward. Some of the poems are quite famous, others moderately so, and some slightly obscure. The dramatizations aren't connected in any way, save for the framing device of a Tibetan man carrying another man on a handmade back-chair through the mountains, which intervenes every 30 minutes or so and culminates in a poem-accompanied religious ceremony. The poems are presented in utterly different ways: some as direct dramatic declamations; some as accompaniments to documentary-like records of child-rearing, weddings, or religious processions; some as theatrical mini-spectacles; some as accompaniment to scenes which involve no humans at all.
This is a very German movie, in the best way. The poems which are recited by characters on-screen (including David Bennent, Carmen Birk, and Klaus-Maria Brandauer), are recited with whacking great dollops of dramatic flair, in the tradition of German-speaking lands. Some English-speakers, who are accustomed to less stylized poetry recitation in which the 'words are supposed to do all the work', may find this a bit off-putting at first. Yet when this sort of dramatic declamation is done right (as with Brandauer above, rendering every other reading of this Heine poem -- perhaps any Heine poem -- superfluous), it is enthralling. (It's also worth keeping in mind that these poets wrote in a culture in which they would expect their poems to be dramatically declaimed by actors.)
The settings and accompaniment for the poems are never predictable, and, at their best, create a touching, ironic, or bizarre field of interference with the words of the poem itself, as when Ernst Jandl's bleak Believe and Confess (g) (in which he bluntly states that he knows he will never see his dead loved ones again and confesses that he hasn't the 'slightest wish' for this to happen) is accompanied by tear-stained, boozy, unstaged scenes from a very ordinary German wedding, or when Trakl's frothingly mystical Morgenlied (g) is recited by David Bennent, in full knightly armor, wandering down the median of a German highway.
'Poem' is by turns mesmerizing, pretentious, funny, moving, witty, ironic, and preposterous. A few of the musical choices have gotten a bit stale (the music of Arvo Pärt, for all its charm, has become an art-house cliche), and a few of the settings are in questionable taste. But that's what makes 'Poem' so lively -- the filmmakers take risks, and sometimes the rewards are spectacular. Strongly recommended.
After the collapse of East Germany, the question arose of what to do with all those East German books. East Germany had many publishing houses and a quite well-developed educational system. Nevertheless, a typical East German biography of Bismarck, say, was unlikely to be competitive with its West German (or non-socialist) counterpart. Not to mention the hundreds of university coursebooks on 'socialist' small-business management, town planning, early-childhood education, etc. Some of these books made their way to used booksellers, where I eagerly bought as many as I could, as I find them fascinating. Others, however, were unceremoniously dumped into the garbage or left to molder in storage.
Then came Peter Sodann, a German actor and theater director who grew up in East Germany. He started collecting these books to preserve a part of German history and culture. The 'Peter Sodann' library is now open in the small town of Staucha, in Saxony. It even has an online catalog, which is quite extensive. Apparently much of the cost of the library is covered by donations and by volunteer catalogers. Many of the books, the website states, remain in banana crates, waiting to be catalogged.
Given my fascination with East Germany, I will be planning a pilgrimage there shortly, and will report...
Rolf Dobelli makes a powerful argument that following the news compulsively isn't just a waste of time but is positively harmful. A few of his points:
News is irrelevant. Out of the approximately 10,000
news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that –
because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a
serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The
point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find
it very difficult to recognise what's relevant. It's much easier to
recognise what's new. The relevant versus the new is the fundamental
battle of the current age. Media organisations want you to believe that
news offers you some sort of a competitive advantage. Many fall for
that. We get anxious when we're cut off from the flow of news. In
reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news
you consume, the bigger the advantage you have.
...
News makes us passive. News stories are
overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition
of news about things we can't act upon makes us passive. It grinds us
down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised,
sarcastic and fatalistic. The scientific term is "learned helplessness".
It's a bit of a stretch, but I would not be surprised if news
consumption, at least partially contributes to the widespread disease of
depression.
News kills creativity. Finally,
things we already know limit our creativity. This is one reason that
mathematicians, novelists, composers and entrepreneurs often produce
their most creative works at a young age. Their brains enjoy a wide,
uninhabited space that emboldens them to come up with and pursue novel
ideas. I don't know a single truly creative mind who is a news junkie –
not a writer, not a composer, mathematician, physician, scientist,
musician, designer, architect or painter. On the other hand, I know a
bunch of viciously uncreative minds who consume news like drugs. If you
want to come up with old solutions, read news. If you are looking for
new solutions, don't.
I could hardly agree more. I follow the news much more than I should (the job requires a certain amount of this) but I try to limit it as much as possible, for precisely the reasons Dobelli indicates. It almost always turns out to be an utter waste of time. Because I myself don't follow the news very much, Dobelli was not on my radar screen, even though he's apparently a best-selling German-language author whose most recent book is now being translated into many languages, including English.
First of all, kudos to Theresa for correctly guessing the origin of the picture I posted yesterday. It was the cover illustration for Max Gallo's book The Night of Long Knives, an account of the Röhm purge:
The illustration comes from one of my favorite blogs, Pop Sensations, in which an English professor presents the juiciest items from his collection of 1950s-1960s pulp fiction paperbacks. Drink-sodden gun molls, lesbian seductresses, hard-boiled private dicks, 'shockingly frank' depictions of suburban orgies -- you name it, it's there. If you've never visited before, say goodbye to your afternoon. The 'gay' section is particularly revealing -- although somehow Pop Sensations didn't tag the Röhm book as gay. A rare Bildungslücke.
And now to housekeeping. I'm switching to moderated comments from now on. There was too much spam, and the counter-measures kept snagging genuine comments (you know, serious discussions about penis enlargement or carpet cleaning in Flagstaff, Arizona). I'm sorry for the inconvenience, and hope everyone will still keep up the great stuff in comments, which for a long while has outshined the idle noodlings I post.
While cloistering myself in the Natural Sciences Library to finish an article, I happened upon a book called Squaring the Circle, which is a minute historical exploration of that famous scientific problem, written in 1911 in impeccably dry English scientific prose by one E.W. Hobson, Sc.D, LL.D., F.R.S., Sadleirian Professor or Pure Mathematics, and Fellow of Christ's College, in the University of Cambridge. This biography of Hobson observes that he was '[b]rought up in rigidly Low Church surroundings ...' but 'developed strong views of rationalism, becoming ... an avowed radical and agnostic'. On pages 3 and 4, he notes that attempts to solve this famously insoluble problem* have occupied uncounted cranks over the centuries:
The solutions propounded by the circle squarer exhibit every grade of skill, varying from the most futile attempts, in which the writers shew an utter lack of power to reason correctly, up to approximate solutions the construction of which required much ingenuity on the part of their inventor. In some cases it requires an effort of sustained attention to find out the precise point in the demonstration at which the error occurs, or in which an approximate determination is made to do duty for a theoretically exact one. The psychology of the scientific crank is a subject with which the officials of every Scientific Society have some practical acquaintance. Every Scientific Society still receives from time to time communications from the circle squarer and the trisector of angles, who often make amusing attempts to disguise the real character of their essays. The solutions propounded by such persons usually involve some misunderstanding as to the nature of the conditions under which the problems are to be solved, and ignore the difference between an approximate construction and the solution of the ideal problem.
It is a common occurrence that such a person sends his solution to the authorities of a foreign University or Scientific Society, accompanied by a statement that the men of Science of the writer's own country have entered into a conspiracy to suppress his· work, owing to jealousy, and that he hopes to receive fairer treatment abroad. The statement is not infrequently accompanied with directions as to the forwarding of any prize of which the writer may be found worthy by the University or Scientific Society addressed, and usually indicates no lack of confidence that the bestowal of such a prize has been amply deserved as the fit reward for the final solution of a problem which has baffled the efforts of a great multitude of predecessors in all ages.... It is interesting to remark that, in the year 1775, the Paris Academy found it necessary to protect its officials against the waste of time and energy involved in examining the efforts of circle squarers. It passed a resolution, which appears in the Minutes of the Academy, that no more solutions were to be examined of the problems of the duplication of the cube, the trisection of the angle, the quadrature of the circle, and that the same resolution should apply to machines for exhibiting perpetual motion. An account of the reasons which led to the adoption of this resolution, drawn up by Condorcet, who was then the perpetual Secretary of the Academy, is appended. It is interesting to remark the strength of the conviction of Mathematicians that the solution of the problem is impossible, more than a century before an irrefutable proof of the correctness of that conviction was discovered.
Apparently the problem is insoluble because pi is a transcendental number, a fact which was proven in 1882. After this introduction, Professor Hobson proceeds, over hundreds of inadvertently Kafkaesque pages, to minutely detail every single failed attempt to solve this problem. One of the more exotic ones gave rise to this diagram:
One of the unforgettable details of the
novel was the obsession of Hans Castorp (the main character) with the
elusive Clavdia Chauchat, who Mann describes repeatedly as having Kyrgyz
eyes. This is, indeed, one of her defining features. "Kyrgyz eyes" were
also a feature of an earlier breathless obsession in Castorp's life--a
young boy who had many years before loaned young Hans a pencil on the
school playground. So Mann echoes these eyes and these obsessions (even the pencil) throughout the novel.
I also wondered exactly what Mann meant by Kyrgyz eyes (Kirgisenaugen). Messer provides us with this photo of actual Kyrgyznauts, or whatever one calls people from Kyrghyzstan:
The New Republic has an amusing interview with V.S. Naipaul (h/t SK). His opinions on Mann, Wodehouse and Jane Austen:
IC: I was wondering what you like to read now.
VSN: I read many things. I read to fill in my knowledge of the world. I am reading this writer, [Thomas] De Quincey, here [points to the book]. The other thing I am reading, quite unusual for me, is Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks. I was staggered by it.
IC: Why did it stagger you?
VSN: It was so wise. Wonderful narrative gift. His language is
wonderful. When he is talking, it varies from mode to mode. And it’s
always marvelous. He has to deal with typhoid, which will kill his
character, and he does it pulling away. He goes inside the sufferer and
says, this is what happens to a cancer patient, a typhoid patient. At a
certain stage, life calls out to him. Very beautiful way of writing. I
am feeble trying to paraphrase. Very, very moving. I was dazzled by it.
IC: Are there English or British authors you go back to time and again?
VSN: No, no. Who do you go back to?
IC: [George] Orwell. P.G. Wodehouse.
VSN: I can’t read Wodehouse. The thought of, shall we say,
facing three or four months of nothing but Wodehouse novels fills me
with horror.
IC: What about George Eliot?
VSN: Childhood, you know, childhood. A little of [The Mill on the Floss]
was read to me. It mattered at the time. But as you get older, your
tastes and needs change. I don’t like her or the big English writers. I
don’t like [Charles] Dickens.
IC: No British writers.
NN: The poets he likes, not the prose. He likes the columnists more than the writers.
VSN: I don’t want to upset them.
NN: He upsets people for no reason.
IC: I was going to ask about his Jane Austen comments.
NN: Oh God, everybody hates Jane Austen. They don’t have the
balls to say it. Believe me. Who did we meet the other day, that famous
academic who said Jane Austen was rubbish? And I said, “Why don’t you
stand up and say it.” And he said, “Am I mad?” They have all reassessed
her, but they just don’t want to say it.
IC: Do you want to expand on why you don’t like her? You think she’s trivial?
VSN: Yes, it is too trivial. A romantic story. It doesn’t do
anything for me. It doesn’t tell me anything. It’s not like Mann talking
about death. He has a way of dealing with it.
That's an intelligent reason for admiring Buddenbrooks, which I find otherwise a bit tedious.
As part of my ongoing search for televised pap to watch in the gym, I decided to check out Band of Brothers, the 2001 HBO miniseries about American paratroopers fighting it out across Western Europe from the beaches of Normandy to Berchtesgaden. The series is based on recollections and memoirs of members of Easy Company, and each episode is prefaced by short interviews with these survivors. Given the names of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks on the packaging, I was expecting a fairly standard mixture of gung-ho ethnic-comrades war movie and high-tech battle scenes, but it turned out to be more interesting than I'd expected. The characterizations are fairly superficial, but the battle scenes are grisly and harrowing, full of agonizingly random death and disfigurement meted out according to no plan at all. After the battles, the soldiers look drained and slack-jawed, leaving little time for banter about Betty Grable pin-ups. Further, you see American soldiers occasionally doing things that were rarely seen in earlier World War II movies, such as deserting, cowering in terror, going insane from fear, shooting POWs, looting homes, and drunkenly killing their comrades. This is not to say that American troops are portrayed as sadistic marauders -- the opposite is true -- but that the inhuman stress and anarchy of combat grind down all but the strongest characters.
Impressed with the first series, I watched the follow-up series The Pacific, which focuses on a narrower set of characters. This makes it easier to develop an attachment to each of the three main characters. But as before, it's the battle scenes that pack the most punch. The marines fight on Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa in an inferno of charred rock, stunted trees, decomposing corpses, disease, mud, slime, and flying metal. Mire-encrusted Japanese soldiers pop out seemingly at random, rushing marines in horrifyingly, comically futile banzai charges, only to die in hails of machine-gun fire or gouts of napalm. One of the fine things about these series is the avoidance of patronizing voice-overs. You see the war from a grunt's-eye perspective, and you're told nothing more about their missions than they are.
This means I found myself confronting embarrassing gaps in my knowledge of WWII, so I decided to remedy that by reading a nice solid one-volume history of the war. I settled on Gerhard Weinberg's A World at Arms. I wasn't disappointed. First, to get a few things out of the way: this is not a 'social' or oral history. This is straight-ahead generals'-eye view strategic military history. Further, you will not be stunned at the beauty of Weinberg's prose. Once in a while, Weinberg (a German Jew who emigrated to the US in the late 30s and took part as a US soldier in the occupation of Japan) perpetrates what can only be described as barely-comprehensible German Schachtelsätze (box-within-box sentences full of confusing clauses). But aside from these very occasional lapses, though, the prose is serviceable and clear.
What Weinberg excels at -- and really, what the book as a whole is for -- is showing the truly global scope of the war. A bombing raid in Europe destroys telephone cables, forcing the Germans to use radio communications, which in turn provides a critical piece of the puzzle to decode German diplomats' dispatches from Japan, shifting the strategic balance halfway across the world. The re-capture of some resource-rich area by the Soviets disrupts supplies of raw material, causing a production crisis that affects the German front as well as a diplomatic push to secure the material from some neutral country, which then reports this information to the Allies, shifting their priorities. American naval power cuts off supplies of gasoline to the southern Japanese fleet, forcing them to rely on unprocessed oil from Borneo that degrades the performance of Japanese warships and causes them to emit gouts of thick smoke visible for miles. It's global war as three-dimensional chess.
This wide perspective buttresses Weinberg's often-blunt assessments of various military and political leaders. Weinberg has a rather dim view of showboats such as Montgomery, Patton, and MacArthur, whose (occasional) battlefield victories were overshadowed by the unnecessary conflicts cause by their arrogance. Alanbrooke, Marshall, Arnold, Nimitz and Eisenhower get better marks, not only for their strategic insight but also for their understanding that in a war that requires careful management of broad coalitions, a certain amount of humility and respect goes a long way. Churchill, while an inspiring leader, occasionally let his desperate desire to cling to the British empire cloud his judgment. (He wanted to keep Allied forces in the Eastern Mediterranean -- near many British colonies -- long after the strategic focus should have shifted to the Normandy invasion). Roosevelt comes off as perhaps the most far-sighted political leader, encouraging his subordinates to vigorous debate and making surprisingly sound decisions despite limited information. Stalin, although cunning and remorseless, inspired and forced his countrymen to sacrifices which were vital to the war effort. Weinberg singles out Soviet generals for ingeniuously covering-up the weakness of their infantry by skilled and bold use of artillery (especially the 'Stalin organ') and excellent tanks.
Weinberg draws heavily on the memoirs and other papers of British general Alan Brooke, later Viscount Alanbrooke, whom Weinberg argues is perhaps the most-underrated military figure of World War II. Since I'd never heard of him before, I was confused by the mixed references to Alan Brooke and then someone named Alanbrooke, but that's what Google is for. Weinberg doesn't have much time for moral debates. He writes from the perspective of the practical and hard-headed men fighting and planning the war. As soon as the Nazis had started indiscriminate bombing in Poland, Rotterdam, and London, the Allies felt, they had given up any real right to complain. Weinberg also argues for the effectiveness of widespread bombing. It didn't break civilian morale, but it wasn't primarily intended to do that. Once the Allies figured out that they had to repeatedly bomb the same targets to keep them off-line, the bombing severely degraded Germany's war-fighting capacity. Further, the massive bombing of Germany was one of the only ways England and the U.S. could help the Soviet Union during its 1941-44 death match with Hitler in the East. Weinberg also has praise for the Allied strategy in the Pacific -- instead of trying to free every island in the Japanese empire, the allies simply skipped the less important emplacements and established themselves nearer to Japan. This caught the Japanese by surprise and left thousands of soldiers stranded beyond supply lines with no way to effectively attack the Allied rear. Weinberg is particularly good on submarine combat. The Germans' superior tactics and technology enabled them to inflict heavy losses on Allied shipping until advanced countermeasures such as 'Huff-Duff' and Leigh lights began turning the tide.
America's full entry into the war in 1941, Weinberg shows, started a countdown clock for the Axis powers. America's huge industrial capacity, well beyond the reach of attack, meant that the longer the war lasted, the more lopsided the Allied material advantage would become. Even significant American strategic mistakes, such as the policy of sending green replacements to the Western European front before they were ready, couldn't change this dynamic. This ticking clock forced the Axis powers into strategic gambles designed to achieve some sort of separate peace on one front before American military might could be fully brought to bear. To respond, the Allies early agreed to unanimously demand nothing but unconditional surrender from all foes, a demand that was further justified by the emerging evidence of Axis (especially German) atrocities. Hitler also tried to offset the Allies' growing material advantage by diverting enormous resources into cutting-edge weapons such as advanced submarines which didn't need to surface, unmanned rockets (such as the infamous V-1 and V-2s, which were to be succeeded by ever-more-accurate versions), and supermassive artillery weapons which could only move on railway tracks. Weinberg argues that these programs consumed huge amounts resources while having little practical impact.
As for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Weinberg presents the case not from hindsight, but from the perspective of planners desperate to avoid more hideous battles like Okinawa. FDR (who opposed gas or chemical weapons) essentially saw nuclear weapons as nothing more than ultra-powerful explosives, and would certainly have used them had he survived. Once Stalin was told that the Americans had working bombs, he urged them to drop them on Japan as soon as possible. The Americans had broken most Japanese diplomatic codes and knew the Japanese were putting out peace feelers, but these were not coming from people who had a chance of changing government policy, and in any event stopped well short of accepting unconditional surrender. Even after the bombs had been dropped on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviets had entered the war, it still took Hirohito's personal intervention to force recalcitrant top brass to accept surrender. Even then, they staged a last-minute coup to continue the war which nearly succeeded. The atomic bombings were horrifying and brutal, but no more so than the March 1945 fire-bombing of Tokyo, which killed upwards of 100,000 people. And the atom bombs did render the invasion of the Japanese home islands -- which would have led to millions more deaths -- unnecessary. One can spin out counterfactuals about other approaches that could have forestalled an invasion of the home islands, but the overwhelming desire of all Allies was to end the war in the Pacific as soon as possible, and the nuclear weapons seemed the likeliest way to accomplish this. The Germans, for their part, never came close to developing an atom bomb, but had been the first to develop military nerve gas in the 1930s. Hitler was mistakenly informed that the Allies probably also had nerve gas, likely much more of it than Germany did, so he never used it. When the Soviets came across the German nerve gas factory in Poland, they quietly dismantled the entire thing and moved it to Russia. No fools, those Soviets.
Weinberg wraps up with a chapter on the aftermath of the war, which included the biggest short-term mass-migration in history, in which 10-12 million Germans were unceremoniously kicked out of the occupied East and forced to return to their ravaged nation. Stalin set up puppet governments in the countries in his sphere of influence, something that the Allies watched with unease but couldn't do much about. It was the titanic sacrifices of the Soviets, after all, that had enabled the Allies to win. East Germany was put under the control of Communist exiles who had fled to Russia. As Weinberg points out, surviving as an exile amid the show trials and purges in Stalin's Russia required extreme timidity and subservience, so the exiles who returned to take over East Germany on Stalin's behalf were, in Weinberg's words, 'certified blockheads'. The British were originally willing to simply issue warrants for high-ranking Nazis ordering them to be shot on sight, but other Allies thought at least some sort of trial was necessary. Greece, although freed from forced membership in the Eastern Bloc, plunged into civil war. In the most optimistic development, Western Europe began knitting itself together in a so-far successful attempt to prevent a further Continent-wide bloodbath.
A World at Arms does have its flaws. Weinberg's treatment of the South Asian and Chinese theaters never quite comes together into a coherent narrative, and I wanted more direct quotations from historical sources, not Weinberg's paraphrases. Further, his historical judgments (on Neville Chamberlain or Soviet foreign policy, for instance) are starkly expressed. You get the sense that he is settling scores with other historians, but you're not provided with enough detail and context to understand the dispute he's taking a side in, or why you should agree with him. However, remedying these defects would have made the book even longer, and Weinberg's bibliographical essay and notes provide plenty of guidance for those who want to go further. All in all, a splendid read.
From 50 Watt, the Nuremberg ABC of 1912, illustrated by Olga Kopetzky. Over at 50 Watt, they say: "I can't find so much as a blurb about Olga (1868–1928), who published
under "O. Kopetzky." Her work has been in circulation, though, as she
illustrated an oft-reprinted 1915 edition of Paul Carus's Gospel of Buddha."
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