DACH

Remains of the Hohenzollern day: some Silesian castles

DACH seems to have an appropriately sporting theme this summer, what with Susan's entries on the Olympics and mine about the hiking and biking territories of Saxon Switzerland. It seems only appropriate, then, that my current one should be about another place the hikers love and loved – Silesia.

Silesia has over the centuries variously been attached to Poland, Bohemia, the Holy Roman Empire and Prussia. Today, the majority of it is again in Poland, but this blog entry concerns things which happened in the then predominantly German-speaking Lower Silesia during part of the 200 years between 1742 and 1945 that it was attached to the Kingdom of Prussia.

I used to think that Silesia's name evoked a wild and empty land, where castles stood on lonely rocks against a lowering sky and people went to hide away, only to be trampled and swept west by an advancing Red Army. The reality of the Silesian countryside is actually a lot sunnier and far more civilized, but the pre-1918 German aristocracy certainly looked upon the area as a romantic hideaway destination.

Military manoeuvres in Lower Silesia's most important town, Breslau (now Wroclaw), loomed large in the time and attention of Prussia's ruling class, and between 1820 and 1900 the Hohenzollerns themselves more or less colonised the Hirschberg Valley nearby, reconditioning existing castles and building new ones to retreat to when duties were done. The finished efforts ranged from turreted fantasies to more modest places resembling suburban villas. Here, against the idyllic background of rolling fields and distant hills, they could hike, hunt, nurse grudges and pursue their family quarrels in peace.

Strangely, this seems to have driven nearly everyone else away, apart from the multinational Schaffgotsch family who originally owned everything in the area, and held a few places in reserve so they could monitor what was going on. With romantic gardens, exclusive little spa towns, footpaths, miniature carp ponds and gothic follies abounding, the Hirschberg valley in its heyday must have been more like Marie Antoinette’s toy farm on a grand scale than the desolate frontier of my imagination!

Krummhübel and Schreiberhau, little towns on the edge of the Giant Mountain (Riesengebirge) range just outside the valley, catered to less privileged tourists who cared more about mountains than manoeuvres. Two different hiking clubs called the Riesengebirgsverein grew up on either side of the Bohemian/Prussian border here in the late nineteenth century. Between them they constructed a full network of trails and mountain huts; and the resorts also began to attract skiers.

My old impression was correct in some ways: the Red Army really did sweep everything before it, and today most of Silesia is Polish-speaking, its towns renamed and population from the German-speaking areas relocated. The people living in Lower Silesia now are descendants mainly of refugees from Lviv, themselves driven north and west by the Russians. The Hirschberg (now directly translated as Jelenia Gora) Valley's devastated castles languished for a long time, seen as very low priority by a country intent on forging a resolutely un-German identity for the area, and on caring for a war-exhausted population.

Of late, though, there's been a remarkable renaissance. As the Germans came back on holiday and the Polish economy grew enterprising individuals began to acquire the shells of the former imperial retreats, transforming them into holiday homes accessible to everyone. In 2012, Jelenia Gora Valley has a surprising concentration of castle hotels, with more to come, oases of sophistication set on tiny rural roads in little villages perhaps more obscure and isolated today than they were in the Prussian era. You can buy glossy little books about their histories at the hotel receptions, and explore the romantic ruins of the estates still to be restored. Accessible they certainly are, though: a stay in a Hohenzollern castle such as Wojanow (previously Schildau) will cost you less than a motel in the UK. Just don't tell everyone

Janet Ashton (who also took the pictures)

Before (Bobrow) ... 

                 ... and after (Schildau/Wojanow)

 

 

 

When the trains didn't run on time

You might want to steer clear of Saxon Switzerland on Ascension Day – that is, if you'd like to leave the country with any intact illusions about German trains running on time, or other national stereotypes.

Ascension Day is a public holiday in many European countries, and because it falls on a Thursday in May a lot of people take a long weekend and go away for the first break of the summer. In Germany, where it's called Himmelfahrt, it is also celebrated as Vatertag, Father’s Day, particularly in the Protestant states or those which were once in the GDR and disavowed religious festivals for a while. Its traditions are said to date back to days when men from rural communities would roam the countryside in spring, drinking to a good harvest.

Saxon Switzerland – and the adjoining Bohemian Switzerland – is the national park which lies alongside the Elbe between Prague and Dresden. Most British people I've spoken to about it have never heard of it and assume it's actually in Switzerland. Its rolling landscape punctured by weird sandstone rock formations and soft green forests actually look nothing like its namesake, but it was given the name by artists in the Romantic era, who loved to go there to paint. Hans Christian Andersen, Rainer Maria Rilke and other such literary luminaries followed, leaving accounts or poetry, which of course the BL holds, of their ramblings through the rough and dramatic countryside. [e.g. 10027.bb.20.]

In the late nineteenth century mass tourism arrived, strongly encouraged on the Bohemian side at least by local aristocrats, who saw the opportunity to transform the backward, rural area to everyone's advantage. Some examples of contemporary hiking maps can be seen in the BL – e.g. at Maps 29332.(22.) and Maps 29332.(20.). The landmarks on the Bohemian side of the border still bear the names of members of the Kinsky or Clary-Aldringen dynasties, and the hills are dotted with memorials to hotel-owners with names like Fiedler, ghostly but unselfconscious reminders of the German-speakers expelled after 1945, whose descendants now come here on holiday. There are footpaths and viewpoints, boat rides, cycle tracks and pensions galore.

Dresden's shiny new S-Bahn runs down the Elbe as far as the Czech border, delivering the many day trippers from the city to gaze at the grim Konigstein fortress, and wander across the vertiginous Bastei bridge. More serious hikers stay for days, and I knew something was up when I had trouble booking a room for May 17th in any of the picturesque towns along the river. That morning, Ascension Day, all the cafes had hogs roasting on spits outside at 9am, and people watched with pints in their hands. The trains were running terribly late, and when they finally limped into the stations they would disgorge hordes of gasping people, fanning themselves and struggling not to fall in the crush. Men bent on celebrating Vatertag pulled home-made carts with beer and even barbecues on them, and there were ingenious devices for carrying tiny bottles of spirits attached to their belts like ammunition. The low carts are not unique to Saxony; they have become a stereotype of the Ascension Day celebrations in Germany. Most of the revellers seemed very good-natured, though were a handful of exchanges between police and shaven-headed youths from the darker corners of Dresden. 

For obvious reasons, Vatertag is not universally popular in Germany. By evening, however, the men had all trooped home again, leaving the bucolic delights of Bad Schandau, Konigstein, Rathen and Wehlen to more sedate weekenders and family groups, while police barges cruised the Elbe vainly looking for any stragglers.

The trains took their time getting back to normal, though!

Janet Ashton (who also took the pictures)

A Sense of Place

The opening of our new "Writing Britain" exhibition, and the accompanying interactive map where website visitors can mark their favourite literary places, has made me think about German books I've read which convey a sense of place.

The Germans have a name for one kind of literature which celebrates a specific place: "Heimatliteratur". This refers to a popular, often kitschy genre which grew up in the late 19th century as a reaction to growing industrialisation and depicts an idealised version of rural life. The genre has recently merged with crime fiction to create the "Heimatkrimi", detective novels which play, sometimes semi-humorously, on local traditions and stereotypes.

Although they wouldn’t be given the same label, there are more literary works which reflect the landscape and traditions of a particular region. Theodor Storm’s evocative novella Der Schimmelreiter, set on the north German coast, is a great example. But most of the German literary locations which spring to my mind from my own reading are cities. 

Although never named in the novel, Lübeck is clearly the setting of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. When the novel first appeared guides were published identifying the originals of houses, streets (and characters!) in Mann's fiction. This was, of course, missing the point. Like many great books which convey the spirit of a place, Buddenbrooks is not primarily "about" Lübeck, despite being permeated with the city’s atmosphere.

Günter Grass is another author whose native city haunts his work from the early "Danzig Trilogy" novels to more recent autobiographical works. Today you can take a tour of sites in Gdánsk associated with his life and works, but like Mann, Grass uses the city not just as an identifiable physical location but also as a metaphor, in this case for the complexities of 20th century history.

Turning to a younger generation, Uwe Tellkamp's novel Der Turm is set in Dresden during the late 1980s. The "tower" of the title is based on the city's Weisser Hirsch district where Tellkamp grew up. I started reading the novel while on holiday in Dresden, coincidentally just after visiting Weisser Hirsch. Of course Tellkamp was no more writing a guidebook to his native city than Mann or Grass (although, just as with Buddenbrooks a century before, commentators have identified originals of the characters and locations in Der Turm). But being able to picture the places so clearly helped me to find my way into this complex and densely-written novel.

Finally, Berlin, especially the Berlin of the 1920s, is celebrated in many novels. Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz has been called "the most topographically correct novel of Berlin ever written", but it is Döblin's montage technique, juxtaposing excerpts from newspapers, tram timetables, popular songs and snatches of inconsequential talk, often in dialect, that really brings the city alive. The book is a difficult read and tells an often grim story of a man's attempts to lead an honest life on the margins of society, but it’s worth the effort.

For a similarly topographically exact but far gentler view of 1920s Berlin, turn to Erich Kästner's children’s classic Emil und die Detektive. To its young hero, fresh from his small-town home, Berlin is huge, bewildering and loud, but it's also a city where children play freely in the streets and courtyards and, in this case, help to track and catch the thief who has stolen Emil's money. Two very different books, but they both evoke a powerful sense of the same place at the same period.

[SR]

 

Berlin's Alexanderplatz in the 1920s (Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H0724-501-02 / CC-BY-SA)

More about German America...

There is a persistent myth out there in cyberspace and elsewhere that shortly after independence the United States came within one vote of making German its official language. 

This, of course, is untrue: the U.S. actually has no official language, despite all its government documents being printed in English, and in the 1790s people of German descent were far too sparsely represented for their language to present much competition for the dominant one. Nevertheless, perhaps in part because of the close relationship between the Hanoverian/British government and several small German states, Germans and German speakers were among the earliest migrants to the British colonies in North America. Some were British residents, successful enough before they came, but seeking further opportunities. Others fled wars, or the oppression of radical Protestants by the Holy Roman Empire, and established their new towns and colonies in such places as Ephrata and Bethlehem, both in Pennsylvania.

A while ago, I wrote a blog entry on German towns – both original and born-again! – in Washington and Oregon. But the state that springs most readily to mind when I think of Germans in the U.S. is undoubtedly Pennsylvania. There I have heard people speak the distinctive Pennsylvania Dutch, derived from the language once spoken in the Palatinate, from where their ancestors originally came. They also run the celebrated Pennsylvania Dutch restaurants, serving huge portions of hearty Germanic-influenced food to long tables of tourists flung convivially together from all parts of the nation and world. (If you want to investigate further, the Library has cookery books at 7939.o.8, LB.31.b.9553 and 7947.aa.33, for example, as well as works on all other aspects of that culture, in English and German – though not it seems, in Pennsylvania Dutch itself!)

Despite this immediate association, there are other states which have as many Germans in them as Pennsylvania does. The mid-West received many of the second wave of German immigrants, poor farmers who came in the nineteenth century as economic migrants in search of a better life. Simultaneously, Yiddish-speaking Jews from Germany, Austria, Poland and Russia arrived mainly on the eastern seaboard, seeking refuge from the increasingly extreme racial and religious policies of their homelands. Another set of victims of such policies were the lesser-know Russian Germans, Protestants who left their homes on the Black Sea and in the Volga basin as a result of Tsar Alexander III's harsh Russification policies, which aimed to stamp out their language and questioned their loyalty to the nationalist Tsar. The BL has a good selection of books on these 'Volga Germans', in Russian, German and English, including ones specifically devoted to their life in the U.S. (e.g. 77/20765). They settled in Nebraska, Kansas and North Dakota, but when the land proved inhospitable some moved west. The migration continued into the 1960s, when the Boeing-based success of Seattle and its environs, allied to a temperate climate, drew mid-westerners away from the car plants of Detroit to new opportunities in booming industry.

Most recently, either Nazis or Communists drove many ethnic Germans – including such prominent names as Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang – to seek new homes in the United States. (Ironically, Brecht later attracted the attention of the un-American Activities Committee, and returned to Europe.)

Outside specific parts of Pennsylvania or Dakota, however, the Germans are now largely assimilated into mainstream English-speaking culture, and some of the best-known German Americans would be unrecognisable to us under their original names. This is perhaps overwhelmingly a consequence of World War One and of forced assimilation; the Library has a (German-language) study of the treatment of German Americans during those years at YA.2002.a.22389.

Nevertheless, up to 15% of the current U.S. population claims mainly German descent, and their influence is obvious in every sphere from everyday words (Kindergarten) to brewing and fast food.

Janet Ashton (West European Cataloguing Team Manager)

Ephrata Pennsylvania (Photo: Janet Ashton)

 

Some corner of a foreign field

It's that time of year again. In the middle of Leeds, where I live (being based primarily on the Library's northern site, twenty-something miles away near Boston Spa), the German Christmas market has opened for business, selling such delights as hand-made toys, smoked meats and Stollen to the streams of visitors who pass by each day. Most popular of all is the beer hall, which stays open hours longer than the stalls, and from which the sound of music of all kinds can be heard far into the night.

The Christmas market – whose organisers come from Frankfurt - has been an annual event for the best part of a decade now, and Leeds is far from being the only British city that has one. An appetite for painted houses and hearty food seems to have captured the English-speaking world in the last few decades. I saw the same thing in the Pacific north-west of the United States a month or so ago. Washington and Oregon both have more people of German descent than of any other ancestry, but that is not the only reason for the Germanic influences evident there.

Aurora, Oregon, a small town established as a self-sufficient Protestant commune in the 1850s, continued to be German speaking to some degree until the 1930s. Today, though, the town's museum, which tells the story of local families and displays handicrafts in several original buildings, is the only prominent evidence of this history. As in many places, the coming of the railroad slowly broke down the community’s social and linguistic cohesion. Today Aurora resembles most other picturesque clapboard towns, from New England to the west coast.

Not far away, Mt. Angel is named for the Swiss city of Engelberg from which many of its inhabitants first came, and known for its Abbey and strong Catholic tradition, which also serves Oregon's large Hispanic population. Because of the sound of Spanish being spoken, and despite a huge Glockenspiel on one corner, the town does not have a pre-eminently Germanic feel to it, except perhaps during the annual Oktoberfest.

By far the best known of the German towns in the Pacific North West, however, is Leavenworth, in Washington. Set in a deep valley cleft through the Cascade mountain range by the delightfully-named Icicle Creek river, Leavenworth was a 19th-century logging and railway town with no claim to any specifically German heritage. Between 1920 and 1960 it suffered a slow decline as its industry fled, leaving it almost as a ghost town. Finally, the locals had a brainwave: looking up at the spectacular backdrop of the wooded Cascades, they decided to convert their town into an alpine village. Studying Bavarian architecture and design, they reconstructed shop-fronts and built new farms and barns, turning Leavenworth into a convincing double for any south German resort, complete with flags in the blue and white Bavarian colours and restaurants named after Ludwig II. German street signs vie with tongue-in-cheek store names ("Das Copyshop"; "Haus of Angels") for the visitor's attention. 
 

Today, Leavenworth is a booming tourist destination which runs a series of festivals, from the ubiquitous Oktoberfest to Christmas lights celebrations. It is also a base for outdoor sports and visits to other parts of the Cascades, and a
popular weekend destination from Seattle and further afield. This ensures that it can escape the charge of being merely an ersatz "Bavarialand", especially since many people of German descent have chosen to move there; it even has its own German-language newspaper now.

Greg King, a friend of mine from the Seattle area, became fascinated as a child with Bavarian castles and architecture. He grew up to write a biography of "mad" King Ludwig II (BL copies at YA.2001.a.26085 and 98/07637), and still speaks almost poetically about childhood trips to Leavenworth. In the days before he was able to visit Bavaria itself, the Washington town with its mountains, rivers and picturesque painted houses proved a more than adequate substitute. Today, he says, if he had the money of fellow Seattle resident Bill Gates, he would buy a couple of mountains and build replicas of Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein to complete the one missing aspect of Bavaria-in-the-Cascades!

Janet Ashton (West European Cataloguing Team Manager)

 

Defining Dresden

I've recently returned from a holiday in Dresden. It's a fascinating city, not only because of its beautiful baroque architecture and amazing museums, but also, I felt, because it's a city that is difficult to characterise – or that can be characterised in many different and conflicting ways.

Perhaps Dresden has always had a bit of an identity crisis: after all both the city and the neighbouring region have a history of being defined in terms of somewhere else. In the nineteenth century the city was nicknamed 'Florence on the Elbe', a northern counterpart to the Tuscan capital in terms of its art and culture, while the countryside south-east of the city became known as 'Saxon Switzerland'. The latter name was actually coined by two Swiss artists (quite a compliment!), while the former was more the result of affectionate civic pride, though the connection was formalised in 1978 when the cities were twinned.

Do these comparisons suggest a city uncertain of its own identity, or just one with a cheerfully cosmopolitan outlook? Another 19th-century nickname, 'the balcony of Europe' suggests the latter. It refers to the Brühl Terrace, where the great and the good of a whole continent could once be seen walking by the Elbe. The view of the Brühl Terrace from the opposite bank of the river also defines Dresden, showing the city's distinctive baroque silhouette to great advantage. 

View of Dresden's Altstadt. Photo by Dr Torsten Henning from Wikimedia Commons

But defining Dresden as a great baroque city is not entirely straightforward. Writing in 1957 about the beautiful Dresden of his childhood, the novelist Erich Kästner  lamented that he could never return there, nor could his readers ever go there because 'it does not exist any more'. Indeed, for many people today Dresden is as much defined by its near-total destruction in an allied bombing raid in February 1945  as by its architecture or its cultural treasures. So the famous silhouette as we see it today is almost entirely the result of post-war reconstruction.

A cynic, then, might say that 'historic' Dresden is more baroque theme park than genuine survival, but the city doesn't feel fake. It's interesting that the reconstruction began under the East German regime, which suggests that Dresden’s baroque heritage was seen even by the Communist authorities as vital part of the city's identity.

Of course today's Dresden can also be defined by the heritage of that regime. Even if the historic city centre is largely free from examples of 'socialist modern' architecture, the suburbs were less fortunate, and behind the GDR Kitsch and Ossi-Wessi joke books on sale in the souvenir shops lurks a sense of historical issues which, even 20 years after reunification, have still not been entirely resolved.

It seems both ironic and symbolic that the most obviously 'East German' building in the old city centre, the 'Palace of Culture' now houses a visitor centre for the Frauenkirche,  as the reconstruction of this iconic church was a post-reunification project which perhaps had as much to say about the hopes of and for the 'new Germany' of the 1990s as it did about the restoration of eighteenth-century glories. Another example of Dresden's multi-facteted identity, interweaving many different pasts with the present and with possible futures.

[SR]

Turning the Tables

I know it’s a blog about the Germans but what about turning the tables and writing down my impressions as a German speaker about the three months that I spent in London. I've got a notion that within a short period of time I saw quite a lot, probably a bit of everything from the entire world culture. Why do I say this? Because you have just a huge choice here and plenty of different possibilities to do something. No matter what, from museums (where you can push buttons or hear figures explaining world history ... amazing for children, to learn by playing). Musicals, theatre, classical music (and every day in summer, the Proms ), concerts, galleries.

Not to forget the British Library which is not a usual Library. I had the opportunity to do work experience here which was wonderful. I saw how the processing of the books works, the history and the architecture of the building. The people working there have a lovely sense of humour. And I have to recommend the tour of the BL. It’s different – not as boring as some guided tours can be. I have always been interested in books but after this time here I’m going to buy probably over 100 books. (More than I had in mind). Some of them that I had a quick look in, are too good to miss. My father would definitely approve.  I'm going to have many demands on my purse (a poor student like me). But as everybody knows; knowledge is expensive (Oxford, Cambridge…).

Oh and what I nearly forgot, the most famous thing that everybody speaks about is probably the weather, because it is so changeable like nowhere else. And to mention the food there is a restaurant near where I stayed in Finchley which has the best fish and chips ever. (Madonna used to go there as well.) There are markets that are as long as the whole Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich . You have parks, you can’t have more green than this. Ok maybe in Scotland… but you know what I mean: you don’t have to go on vacation, it’s not necessary. You have everything here. (I’ve been to Brighton three times.) Lucky you!

Anyway most of the culture related things are for free. I'm perhaps too enthusiastic but I had a really good time. Also impressive is your recycling system. We are probably one of the cleanest countries in the world but we still haven’t a separate recycling system for plastic cups. Stuff like that is general waste in Switzerland.

I think there is something about London and I will come back that's for sure. At the very end I'm left saying: it was a really exciting, interesting time and what stuck out was the friendly nature and the helpfulness of the people everywhere. And this constantly (apart from some bus drivers but that’s another story...)

However I never felt like a foreigner. It was worth the trip.

Arbi Jusufi (Intern in the German Section, July/August 2010)

Remembrance of Bohemia past

I recently returned from a holiday in the beautiful region of the Czech Republic known as South Bohemia.

Back when I was a teenager, I liked to wind people up with my interest in the artist Egon Schiele, whose tortured representations of the human body in the throes of sex or death found him few friends in early twentieth century Austria either. When I mentioned to friends who know of my interest in him that I had visited a museum in Cesky Krumlov devoted to him, I was greeted with a few exclamations of surprise. "Really? I didn't know he was Czech?!" 

Of course, Schiele wasn't Czech; he was a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, born in Tulln near Vienna in 1890 to an ethnically Austrian father, and a mother who would probably have described herself as "Bohemian" (Böhmisch), and who came from the town then known as Krumau an der Moldau. This was Cesky Krumlov, today’s idyllic UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Czech Republic’s second biggest tourist attraction after Prague.  In Schiele’s day, it was almost 70% German-speaking, just one more stop on the network of railway lines that criss-crossed the vast Empire, covering territory that comprises the modern-day states of Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and large swathes of Poland, Italy and Ukraine.  The artist fled there to lie low when his growing reputation for sexually explicit pictures left Vienna too hot to handle. He soon ran into problems in Krumau too, but before he did he managed to produce a good body of work portraying local people and a whole series of innovative roof-and-landscapes. A lot of these pictures are illustrated in Egon Schiele und Krumau: die Stadt am blauen Fluss by Franz E. Wischin [BL shelfmark: LB.31.b.16502] and Between ruin and renewal: Egon Schiele’s landscapes by Kimberly A. Smith [YC.2005.b.2315].

Dissolution of the Empire in 1918 placed Krumau in the new republic of Czecho-Slovakia and gave it a Slavic name, but it was not until after 1945 that the town ceased to be mainly German-speaking. Understandably, the expulsion in 1945-6 of Czechoslovakia’s substantial German-speaking minority still evokes powerful emotions on both sides. I hesitate to wade into the matter, but the complex issue is well-summarised in "National Mythologies and Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of Czechoslovak Germans in 1945" by Eagle Glassheim  (Central European History, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2000), pp. 463-486, accessible electronically within the BL ). Many other books in our collections deal with the topic in more detail, from academic studies to memoirs. Flag wars and stone saints: how the Bohemian lands became Czech by Nancy M. Wingfield [YC.2008.a.1072], is an English-language study, while there are examples of German texts at YA.2002.a.38378, and YF.2007.a.31124, and Czech at YF.2007.a.20491. There is even fiction: Brücke über den Fluss by Johannes Gramich [English translation at H.2009/1503].

The Germans of the Sudentenland and South Bohemia made their new homes in Austria or Bavaria, where, ironically, for forty years they enjoyed a higher standard of living than they would have done had they been allowed to remain in Czechoslovakia. Following the disintegration of the Communist bloc, they have begun to return, usually as tourists, to the places where their ancestors lived, and many Czechs in those border regions once more speak excellent German as a second language. Anecdotes talk also of Germans who are learning Czech in order to converse more freely when they visit their grandparents' native cities.

Some people have a bigger vested interest than others. One notable name is that of Karel Schwarzenberg, the Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs and former EU Council President. Schwarzenberg is a scion of the old Austro-Hungarian nobility, but his family originally hailed from Germany in the days when its states were part of the Holy Roman Empire. For centuries they held the title Dukes of Krumau and owned the vast, looming castle at Cesky Krumlov, as well as extensive estates elsewhere in South Bohemia. Although the last owner of these estates was a notable anti-Nazi, the castles and lands were confiscated by the Communist government after World War Two, under the so-called Lex Schwarzenberg. Born in Prague in 1938, Karel, the current head of the family, grew up in Austria, but is now a Czech citizen once more, tied by family history to a country which once rejected his family as alien by virtue of their name, language and class.

When I was first interested in Egon Schiele, a visit to his former home in central Europe would barely have been possible except as a member of a guided tour. I grew up thinking of the Communist world as grey and strange, utterly apart from the Europe I knew and the old Europe of 1914, which I learned about as a keen history student. Without wishing to sound too portentous or naïve, I find something very hopeful in seeing how much things have changed in social terms since 1990, and in having the privilege of witnessing Central Europe relax and reclaim its own complex history again.

Janet Ashton (West European Cataloguing Team Manager)

The Call of the Mountains

When you read this, I’m actually not in the office, I’m off to follow the call of the mountains! This is also the title of a little section within Seeing Europe with Famous Authors (1914). Today, I’m intending to set off from Berne, to a more remote area of Switzerland just south of Berne; after three days at the Swiss capital and having had a little tour of the Swiss National Library, I yearn to get to see some mountains. I want to follow up how the writer Frederic Harrison described this area:

‘The Alps are international, European, Humanitarian. Four written languages are spoken in their valleys, and ten times as many local dialects. The Alps are not especially Swiss – I used to think they were English – they belong equally to four nations of Europe ; they are the sanatorium and the diversorium of the civilized world, the refuge, the asylum, the second home of men and woman famous throughout the centuries for arts, literature, thought, religion. The poet, the philosopher, the dreamer, the patriot, the exile, the bereaved, the reformer, the prophet, the hero – have all found in the Alps a haven of rest, a new home where the wicked cease from troubling, where mean need neither fear nor suffer.’ (BL shelfmark: 10106.aa.18, p. 73)

I’d better stop Harrison here. This claiming of a landscape and space for humankind, and beyond the national borders sounds more enlightened than what I would expect of the year 1914. Somehow I can’t quite believe that this was written in the year of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and of course the beginning of the most senseless of all wars (in terms of numbers of people dying for no tangible immediate gains).

But maybe it’s better to go back to Switzerland and Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, now that I’m here. And just because I cannot share photos I’m just taking, I have added a second interesting photo: The Tonhalle Zurich. Please note that the caption for the first photo says Turnhalle Zurich – i.e. Zurich Gym, as opposed to Concert Hall Zurich. Oh, and the photo at the top of this post is just one of two random viaducts which I just threw in for extra measure, as the mountains are calling me now.
[CG]