24 June 2015
Back to Belsen: Using the British Library’s Newspaper Collections
The British Library’s online and microfilm newspaper collections are an invaluable resource for the cultural historian. In a year of significant anniversaries related to the Second World War – from the liberation of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps to the rescue of 338,000 Allied troops from Dunkirk and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – these archives can provide an indirect glimpse of events as they unfolded.
Submerged in the mythological narratives, hackneyed rhetoric and clichéd images that have accumulated in the intervening decades, we are in danger of losing touch with the reality of these events. The reports, photographs and readers’ letters found in the newspapers can enable us to reconnect with that reality through the words of those who were living through it.
The liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British troops in April 1945 was one of the most momentous events of the war’s final months. Using online, word-searchable archives of the Daily Express and Daily Mirror alongside microfilm archives of the Evening Standard, three of the most widely read newspapers in 1940s Britain and all available to access in British Library reading rooms, I’ll take a closer look at reaction to this shocking event.
On 19th April 1945, the Daily Express printed some of the earliest photographs taken at Belsen after its liberation. These were evidence, the paper asserted, ‘of the vileness of the creatures we are fighting’ and of ‘the depths of sadistic brutality to which the German has reverted’. In other words, the unexpected and horrific revelations were taken as proof that anti-German wartime propaganda was rooted in truth, that Germany was a nation of barbarians.
Readers’ letters published in the Daily Mirror and the Evening Standard a few days later echoed these sentiments. ‘The evidence of the German maniacal guilt is for all the world to see’, wrote one, while another claimed, ‘The only decent German is a dead German’, echoing a popular wartime phrase. A Mirror reader suggested conducted tours of the camps for anyone who thinks ‘there are still any good Germans. Perhaps then they would change their minds’.
Sign erected by British forces at the gates of Bergen-Belsen after the liberation (Photograph BU 6995 from the Collections of the Imperial War Museum, via Wikimedia Commons)
Such reactions are perhaps unsurprising after six years of total war and a vigorous Ministry of Information propaganda campaign designed to arouse hostility among Britons towards the whole German nation, not just the Nazi elite.
What is more unexpected is the number of obstinately liberal voices that made themselves heard in the midst of a conservative clamour. The Very Rev. W. R. Inge, previously Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, argued in the Evening Standard against the wholesale denunciation of Germany. Germany is ‘a nation of decent people’, he claimed, and we must attempt to understand how they came to ‘acquiesce in these atrocities’. Others, such as cartoonist David Low, emphasised the number of German nationals imprisoned and killed in the camps, while a reader in south-west London demanded the end of ‘the nonsensical generalisation, so dangerous for the future peace of Europe, that Gestapo, Nazis and Germans mean all the same thing.’
‘Don’t forget some of us are Germans’: Cartoon by David Low, Evening Standard 19 May 1945 (© Solo Syndication, image from British Cartoon Archive. Reproduced with kind permission)
These brief examples offer a glimpse of the fascinating and diverse public debate in Britain in the days surrounding the liberation of Belsen. With the resources available at the British Library, we can push the clutter of history aside and return, through the words of journalists and readers, to this and thousands of other momentous events across the world and throughout history.
Judith Vonberg
Judith Vonberg is a PhD student in Cultural History and freelance journalist. You can read and follow her own blog here: https://judithvonberg.wordpress.com
17 June 2015
Waterloo’s Prussian Hero: Blücher and the British
In the summer of 1814, with Napoleon defeated and exiled to Elba, Britons were eagerly welcoming a military hero of the campaign against the French to their shores. It was not (or not only) Wellington’s name that they shouted in the streets, but that of ‘Old Blucher’, the 71-year-old Prussian Field Marshal who had led the victorious allies into Paris and done so much to secure their victory.
Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher (his British admirers seldom wrote and probably never pronounced the umlaut) had enjoyed a long and successful military career, despite over a decade of enforced retirement after he got on the wrong side of Frederick the Great. During the Napoleonic Wars he led Prussian troops with mixed success but great courage, and was instrumental in what was believed to be Napoleon’s final defeat in 1814.
‘Old Blucher beating the Corsican Big Drum’, 1814 Caricature by George Cruikshank celebrating Blücher’s role in defeating Napoleon. (Image from Wikimedia Commons)
It was following this triumph that Blücher visited Britain with other allied leaders and commanders. A trawl through the British Newspaper Archive confirms that he was the most enthusiastically fêted of the visitors, drawing crowds wherever he went. A satirical poem, ‘Blucher and the British Ladies’, in the Morning Chronicle of 23 June 1814 claimed that he could barely go outside without being mobbed by female admirers. Ladies could also show their admiration by wearing the ‘Blucher bonnet and spencer’ and ‘Blucher boots and slippers’, or by dancing to a ‘Blucher Waltz’. Indeed Blücher’s name became attached to many things, including George Stephenson’s first steam locomotive and a racehorse which won the 1814 Derby - while the Field Marshal himself looked on.
Blücher celebrated by British admirers, reproduced in Tom Crepon, Leberecht von Blücher : Leben und Kämpfe (Berlin, 1988) YA.1991.a.19653.
Blücher had hoped to retire to his Silesian estates after the triumphs of 1814, but he was recalled following Napoleon’s return from Elba in March 1815. Despite defeat and injury at the Battle of Ligny on 16 June 1815, he went on to lead his forces to Waterloo two days later. The Prussians’ arrival was decisive in securing the allied victory, and when Wellington and Blücher met late in the evening they saluted each other as victors.
Meeting of Wellington and Blücher, from The Wars of Wellington, a narrative poem. (London, 1819) 838.m.7
Following Waterloo, Blücher at last retired for good. He did not visit Britain again, but he was still celebrated by the British as the joint victor of Waterloo: in a travelling display of Madame Tussaud’s waxworks he was even placed alongside the national heroes of the Napoleonic wars, Nelson and Wellington. However, as the 19th century progressed, popular British accounts of Waterloo began to play down the role of the Prussians and attribute the victory solely or primarily to Wellington. Today Blücher’s name is little known among the general British public, and some might be surprised – perhaps even indignant – to learn that Wellington and his forces needed German assistance to win the day.
However, Wellington himself seemed in no doubt at the time. In his official dispatch of 19 June 1815 he wrote, “I shall not do justice to my feelings or to Marshal Blücher and the Prussian army, if I do not attribute the successful result of this arduous day, to the cordial and timely assistance I received from them.”
Perhaps this year’s Waterloo anniversary will remind the British public of Blücher again, and win him back some of the respect he enjoyed here in 1814 and 1815.
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections
08 June 2015
The Passion of Christ considered as an uphill bicycle race… and what should women wear?
Jésus démarra à toute allure.
En ce temps-là, l’usage était, selon le bon rédacteur sportif saint Mathieu, de flageller au départ les sprinters cyclistes, comme font nos cochers à leurs hippomoteurs … Donc, Jésus, très en forme, démarra, mais l’accident de pneu arriva tout de suite. Un semis d’épines cribla tout le pourtour de sa roue avant.
[Jesus got away to a good start.
In those days, according to the excellent sports commentator St Mathew, it was customary to flagellate the sprinters at the start the way a coachman whips his horses … Jesus, then, got off in good form, but he had a flat right away. A bed of thorns punctured the whole circumference of his front tyre.]
The playful pataphysician Alfred Jarry published ‘La Passion considérée comme course de côte’ (‘The Passion of Christ considered as an uphill bicycle race’) in April 1903 in the satirical Le Canard Sauvage, three months after the inaugural Tour de France was advertised in the newspaper L’Auto, as ‘la plus grande épreuve cycliste du monde entier’ (the biggest cycling challenge in the whole world). Extreme competitive cycling, still relatively new at this point, becomes an ordeal of epic proportions – tantamount to the suffering of Christ, or at least to something never before experienced by man. Late 19th- and early 20th-century French literature absorbs the new image of the bicycle into its pages, as the Realism of Zola and others attempts to present the preoccupations of contemporary society in parallel, and the alternative literature of Jarry sees symbolic potential in the new machine.
Alfred Jarry cycling. (Picture from Wikimedia Commons)
Jarry’s last novel Le Sûrmale (The Supermale; 1902), thematises the bicycle once more, using it to transport a narrative exploration of man’s virility, power and death. André Marcueil, the protagonist, undertakes the impossible 10,000 mile cycle from Paris to Irkutsk, powered by perpetual-motion-food, a substance which allows constant muscular regeneration during activity – and which allows Marcueil the energy for a record-breaking sexual performance on the way (89 ‘conquests’, for those who might be interested). Jarry’s perpetual mover is an ‘coupling of man and machine’, to use Paul Fournel’s description of five-time Tour-winner Jacques Anquetil in his 2012 book Anquetil tout seul. As Freud might have it, the man(-machine) has become a kind of ‘prosthetic God’ – returning us, then, to the demiurgic realm of cycling where we began.
Indeed, cycling, according to French thinkers, can elevate man to the point of transcendence. Roland Barthes, in ‘Le Tour de France comme épopée’ (‘The Tour de France as Epic’, from Mythologies), suggests that, ‘The Tour too, at several points, brushes against the inhuman world: on the Ventoux, we have already left the earth, there we are next to unknown stars’. Cycling is self-discovery for the anthropologist, Marc Augé:
The first stroke of the pedal is the acquisition of a new autonomy, the great escape, palpable freedom, the movement of the point of the toe, when the machine responds to the body’s desire and almost pre-empts it. In a few seconds, the marked horizon frees itself, the landscape moves. I am elsewhere. I am an other, and yet I am myself like never before; I am what I discover. (Eloge de la Bicyclette)
But perhaps all this continental abstraction detracts from a more concrete freedom afforded by the bicycle, one which might temper the Supermale’s authority over it. In Emile Zola’s Paris (1897-8), Marie is confounded by some women upholding dress codes while cycling:
Can you understand that? Women, who have the unique opportunity to put themselves at ease, to fly like a bird, legs finally freed from their prison, and who refuse! If they believe to be more beautiful with a shortened schoolgirl’s skirt, they are wrong! And as for modesty, it seems to me that one ought to be more comfortable showing one’s calves than one’s shoulders […] There are only culottes, the skirt is abominable!
Women have the opportunity to wear short trousers – a freedom that the introduction of the bicycle demands! 1898 also saw the publication of Miss F. J. Erskine’s Lady Cycling (reissued by British Library publications in 2014) which joins Zola’s Marie in carving a space for women cyclists… ‘in moderation’. For Miss Erskine, ‘on no point… has a hotter controversy raged’. On fashion, however, the author cannot concede to the comforts of Marie in Paris. ‘Cycling dress was not the fine art it is now,’ writes Erskine, ‘for park riding we must have an artistically cut skirt, artfully arranged to hang in even portions each side of the saddle’.
Perhaps we need to travel once again to find the answer to the eternal question, succinctly phrased as ‘Rock oder Hose?’ (‘Skirt or Trousers?’), in Der Radfahrsport in Bild und Wort, published by Dr Paul von Salvisberg in 1897. Which is it to be? ‘Both, and, in fact, each have their appropriate time’. A practical compromise.
Cycling gear for ladies (and gents), advertisement from Der Radfahrsport in Bild und Wort (Munich, 1897), British Library YA.1989.b.4724
Whether physically free from the dress and the corset, or free from terrestrial conventionality in a ride amongst the stars, cycling is freedom. That freedom is gained through joining the self (and machine) with nature, as one moves through it. As Dr Ludwig Ganghofer, in Der Radfahrsport in Bild und Wort, enthusiastically writes of a cycling tour:
On the leaves and grass, the dew sparkles; you hear a hundred birds, as if it were a single song; fresh air breathes all around you, and you drink it deeply in thirsty sips.
The poetical Dr Ganghofer, from Der Radfahrsport in Bild und Wort
As summer approaches, we too need to reunite ourselves with nature, ride amongst the stars… This may prove difficult in the city, and we should end here with a word of warning from Miss Erskine:
In the vicinity of large manufacturing towns the rowdy element may at times annoy ladies riding alone, though I have, myself, always met with the greatest kindness and courtesy; still, this may have been by exceptional good fortune, and I have no wish to boast of it.
Pardaad Chamsaz, Collaborative Doctoral Student
References
Alfred Jarry, The Supermale: A modern novel, trans. Barbara Wright, (London, 1968; X.908/14696)
Alfred Jarry, La passion considérée comme course de côte, available via Wikisource; English translation available at: http://www.bikereader.com/contributors/misc/passion.html
Paul Fournel, Anquetil tout seul, (Paris, 2012) ; YF.2014.a.22730
Marc Augé, Eloge de la bicyclette, (Paris, 2008) ; YF.2009.a.37308
Emile Zola, Paris, (Paris, 1898) ; B.26.a.12
Miss F. J. Erskine, Lady Cycling, (London, 1898) BL 07905.ee.7; (2014 reissue: YKL.2014.a.3213)
Dr. Paul von Salvisberg, Der Radfahrsport in Bild und Wort, (Munich, 1897) YA.1989.b.4724
13 May 2015
Grimms’ tales in Translation (and in the British Library)
Perhaps one of the British Museum Library’s worst 19th-century acquisition decisions was not to buy the first edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm when it appeared in 1812. Probably the title put the selectors off, fooling them into thinking that these ‘Children’s and Household Tales’ were intended purely as a domestic entertainment, a ‘mere’ children’s book, a genre we don’t generally buy from overseas. Even the second edition, the earliest that we hold, was not acquired on first publication in 1819 but later in the century; the first volume has a brief manuscript dedication from Wilhelm Grimm to a previous owner.
While the Grimms did not necessarily want to exclude children from their audience, their primary goal was to collect and record German folklore for an academic readership, and both the first and second editions include a volume of scholarly notes on the stories and their origins.
Frontispiece and engraved title-page by from the second edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Berlin, 1819) Cup.403.tt.14.
However, as more and more editions were published, the tales were made more child- or family-friendly. Already in this second edition Wilhelm Grimm had started the process of sanitising and Christianising the stories. The frontispiece to the first volume hints at this process with its rather sentimental illustration of the story ‘Brüderchen und Schwesterchen’, which shows an angel watching over the eponymous brother (transformed into a deer) and sister as they sleep. (Like the portrait in the second volume of Dorothea Viehmann, the tailor’s wife named by the Grimms as a source of a number of stories, the picture is by a third Grimm brother, Ludwig.)
Title-page of the first English translation, by Edgar Taylor, illustrated by George Cruickshank (London, 1823) Cup.402.b.18.
The Grimms’ tales were soon translated into many languages, and the British Library’s holdings of the tales are overwhelmingly English translations published in Britain, the majority aimed at a young audience. These range from more or less direct translations, through re-tellings as picture books or ‘easy readers’, to reimaginings or ‘subversions’ of the tales. Some in this last category are in fact aimed at adults, like the stories in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. And plenty of works of modern German literature which we hold also play on the Grimms’ stories for an adult audience, for example Elfriede Jelinek’s Prinzessindramen and Günter Grass’s Der Butt – ‘translations’ of the stories in a different sense.
Another form of translation –in the sense of interpreting the stories in a different medium – is illustration. Again, most of our illustrated versions of the stories are English translations for children, featuring a roll-call of fine artists including George Cruickshank (the Grimms’ first English illustrator), Walter Crane, Arthur Rackham, Mervyn Peake and Maurice Sendak.
‘The Goose Girl’, illustration by Arthur Rackham to the Grimms’ story from Fairy Tales ... A new translation by Mrs. Edgar Lucas (London, 1900) 12411.eee.27.
To return to actual translations, despite our general policy of not buying foreign children’s literature, a search in our catalogue reveals children’s editions of the Grimms’ tales in many languages, acquired in various ways. Among European languages we have versions in Czech, Dutch, French, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian, as well as the auxiliary languages Esperanto and (more unusually) Volapük, all testifying to the international influence and reach of a collection intended to highlight and preserve a national tradition.
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections
This piece is based on the author’s contribution to a lunchtime talk given in the John Ritblat - Treasures of the British Library Gallery on 13 May, the second in a series organised with the British Academy as part of their Literature Week 2015 and to coincide with European Literature Night. The Library’s copy of the 1819 Kinder- und Hausmärchen is currently on display in the gallery with items related to the other talks. The final talk, on African Folklore and the Tales of Anansi, will take place on Friday 15 May.
15 April 2015
Günter Grass (1927-2015)
Günter Grass, who died this week aged 87, is best known for his first novel Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum), published in 1959, never out of print since, and memorably filmed by Volker Schlöndorff in 1979. When Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, the Nobel Foundation described the novel’s narrator and chief protagonist Oskar Matzerath as “an intellectual whose critical approach is childishness, a one-man carnival, dadaism in action.”
Günter Grass in 2006. (Picture from Blaues Sofa on Wikimedia Commons)
Much of the action of Die Blechtrommel takes place in Grass’s native Danzig, then part of Germany, now Gdansk in Poland. The city remained central to his imagination: two further novels Katz und Maus (Cat and Mouse) and Hundejahre (Dog Years) make up what is known as the ‘Danzig Trilogy’, while his 1992 novel Unkenrufe (The Call of the Toad) revisits the city after the fall of Communism. Visitors to Gdansk today can follow guided tours around sites from his life and work.
Although he was best known as a novelist, Grass was a man of many parts: poet, playwright, artist, political activist and occasional jazz musician. He initially studied sculpture and graphic arts, and his work in these genres continued throughout his life, alongside his writing. A catalogue rasionné of his etchings and lithographs, published in 2007, runs to two hefty volumes and lists nearly 40 exhibitions of his work. His pictures often reflect themes and symbols from his literary works, and certain subjects and images recur over the years (most enduringly fish, especially the flounder that gives its name to his novel Der Butt).
Sculpture by Grass in Göttingen, showing a hand holding a flounder (photo: Susan Reed)
Grass always drew the cover illustrations for his novels, and also produced illustrated collections of poetry. His poetry is less well-known (and more uneven) than his novels, but his first published work was a collection of poems and pictures, Die Vorzüge der Windhühner (‘The advantages of the weathercocks’) and he continued to write poetry throughout his life, in particular causing controversy in 2012 with the long poem ‘Was gesagt werden muß’ (‘What must be said’) which was highly critical of the Israeli government.
The title of the poem also reflects an earlier controversy over politics in Grass’s work. In 1995 the magazine Der Spiegel published a highly critical review by the influential critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki of Grass’s novel Ein weites Feld (Too Far Afield), entitled ‘... und es muß gesagt werden’ (‘... and it must be said’). The novel voiced Grass’s criticism of German reunification, which he thought had been entirely driven by the agenda of a West Germany keen to grab what he called ‘ein Schnäppchen namens DDR’ (‘a bargain called the GDR’). The magazine’s cover fuelled the controversy by showing Reich-Ranicki apparently tearing apart a copy of the book.
Some of Grass’s works, includng his cover illustrations, from the British Library's collection
Controversy was in fact another constant in Grass’s life, most notoriously in 2006 when he admitted in his memoir Beim häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion) that he had been a teenage volunteer in the Waffen-SS rather than a conscript as he had previously implied. This belated confession from an author considered by many as the conscience of the nation, renowned for confronting the past and encouraging others to do so, struck many as hypocritical, and there were even calls for him to be stripped of his Nobel Prize and his honorary citizenship of Gdansk.
But, as many obituarists have pointed out, it is in the end for his novels rather than his political stance or personal failings (or indeed for his poetry or art) that Grass will be remembered. His often exuberant style and his fertile and original imagination were a rich addition to German letters and have impressed readers and influenced authors all over the world. In Die Blechtrommel he created what the Nobel Committee rightly predicted would be “one of the enduring literary works of the 20th century.”
To finish, an odd, and perhaps rather trivial, example of Grass’s cultural reach: I believe that he is the only German novelist (or Nobel laureate) ever to be affectionately plagiarised in the long running BBC Radio serial The Archers. In a 2002 episode, a visiting Eastern European student told the story of how his grandparents met – in fact a somewhat bowdlerised version of the first encounter between Oskar’s grandparents in Die Blechtrommel where Agnes hides Joseph from the police under her voluminous skirts. Archers fans who knew their German literature were no doubt relieved when, in a later episode, the student gave Grass his due and admitted that he had borrowed the story to amuse one of the Archer children.
Perhaps not quite what the Nobel Foundation had in mind, but nonetheless it may have won Grass a few more English readers.
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic collections
Works by Grass referred to in the text:
Die Blechtrommel (Darmstadt, 1959) British Library 011421.p.86. (English translation by Ralph Mannheim, The Tin Drum (London, 1962) X.909/2060.)
Katz und Maus (Neuwied am Rhein, 1961) 12520.pp.14. (English translation by Ralph Mannheim, Cat and Mouse (London, 1963) 11769.w.5.)
Hundejahre (Neuwied am Rhein, 1963) 12521.m.12. (English translation by Ralph Mannheim, Dog Years (London, 1965) X.909/5610.)
Unkenrufe (Göttingen, 1992) YA.1994.a.4374. (English translation by Ralph Mannheim, The Call of the Toad (London, 1992) Nov.1992/1350.)
Günter Grass : catalogue raisonné / herausgegeben von Hilke Ohsoling (Göttingen, 2007). LF.31.b.6661.
Der Butt (Darmstadt, 1977) X.989/71159. (English translation by Ralph Mannheim, The Flounder (London, 1978) X.989/76027.)
Die Vorzüge der Windhühner (Berlin, 1956) X.909/1713.
Ein weites Feld (Göttingen, 1995) YA.2000.a.1568 (English translation by Krishna Winston, Too Far Afield (London, 2000) Nov.2001/1203.)
Beim häuten der Zwiebel (Göttingen, 2006) YF.2007.a.1517. (English translation by Michael Henry Heim, Peeling the Onion (London, 2007) YC.2007.a.14122.)
09 April 2015
The Eyes Have It
Some of the most disturbing scenes in literature have been evoked through imagery of the eyes. They mirror the soul, they express love and loathing, joy and sadness, courage and fear, and encompass so much of what is human in us. Yet with their precious complexity comes a dreadful vulnerability. King Lear has one of the most shocking scenes in drama when Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out by Cornwall. In the Japanese ghost story, The Eyes! The Eyes! a young man dares to stay the night in a derelict temple with a decaying Shoji screen believed to be impregnated with the eyes of evil spirits. The next morning only his eyes are found wrapped in a dirty rag. The blue eyes of Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel flame red with a horrible vindictive look, and in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre Rochester’s violently insane wife Bertha is “like a foul German spectre, a vampire, with fiery red eyes”.
I recently came across a short story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, the German writer, composer and painter, who was an early exponent of this kind of imagery. In Der Sandmann of 1816 he portrayed a folkloric figure who sprinkled sand in the eyes of mischievous children to make them sleep when they wouldn’t go to bed. Nathanael, a child and the main protagonist, associates the Sandman with a mysterious character called Coppelius who regularly visits his father to conduct alchemical experiments. The essence of the story is Nathanael’s progression into mental illness, born of a naturally unstable mind and exacerbated by the stories of the Sandman as a child.
E.T.A. Hoffmann, based on a self-portrait reproduced in Ludwig Zacharias Werner, Aus Hoffmann’s Leben und Nachlass (Berlin, 1823). 10706.b.41.
While the other examples I have given relied on graphic scenes for their effect, apart from one such description at the start of the story the threat to the eyes is maintained by Hoffmann more obliquely, and competes with other strong motifs such as mechanical devices and laughing. For example, when Nathanael is discovered hiding in the room where Coppelius is carrying out an experiment, he is referred to by Coppelius as ‘eyes’ rather than a boy: “‘Augen her, Augen her!’ rief Coppelius mit dumpfer dröhnender Stimme … ‘Nun haben wir Augen – Augen – ein schön Paar Kinderaugen’.” (‘”Eyes here! Eyes here!” cried Coppelius with dark roaring voice … “Now we have eyes – eyes – a beautiful pair of children’s eyes.”’)
Nathanael hiding during Coppelius’s experiment; drawing by Hoffmann, reproduced in Ludwig Zacharias Werner, Aus Hoffmann’s Leben und Nachlass
But his one explicit example is strikingly frightening, particularly as it involves children, whose only half-formed minds struggle to rationalise the fear they experience. Their nanny tells them that if they won't go to bed the Sandman will come and throw sand in their eyes. Their eyes will bulge, drip blood and fall out. They will be taken away to the Sandman’s own children who live in a nest and have curved beaks like owls which they use to peck at and eat children's eyes. The hard vowels in German reinforce the image – “damit picken sie der unartigen Menschenkindlein Augen auf”.
The eyes motif is sustained throughout the story. Clara, Nathanael’s fiancée, has eyes that “springen in Nathanaels Brust wie blutige Funken sengend und brennend” (“spring into Nathanael’s breast, burning and sizzling like bloody sparks”) and, when their love fails and Nathanael becomes infatuated with Olimpia, whom he has only seen at a distance through a telescope, she is finally revealed as merely a mechanical doll which ends up shattered on the floor, its eyes lying randomly amongst the remnants of the wooden corpse: “Nun sah Nathanael, wie ein Paar blutige Augen auf dem Boden liegend ihn anstarrten, die ergriff Spalanzi … und warf sie nach ihm, daß sie seine Brust trafen”. (“Now Nathanael saw a pair of bloody eyes lying on the floor staring at him, which Spalanzi seized and threw at him, hitting him in the chest.”)
Hoffmann’s use of eye imagery creates powerful pictures in the reader’s mind and helps to sustain the brooding menace of the Sandman throughout the story. Sigmund Freud was so impressed by it that he wrote an essay, Das Unheimliche (‘The Uncanny’), wherein he interpreted it as a fear of castration. The story has become an important work as an early 19th century example of the horror short story genre.
Trevor Willimott, former Cataloguer, West European Languages
01 April 2015
Every Day is Fools’ Day
Today being the first of April someone is probably going to try and make a fool of you, whether by making you act foolishly (trying to pick up the coin glued to the floor, bending to tie your perfectly-fastened shoelace) or by playing on your credulity with spoof news stories like the BBC’s famous spaghetti harvest – or the BL’s own unicorn cookbook.
A successful April Fool’s Day trick makes both joker and victims laugh; the victims are only temporarily fooled and appreciate the joker’s skill in catching them out. But in the late mediaeval literary genre of ‘Narrenliteratur’ (fool literature) the authors depict folly not as a brief moment but as a part of the human condition, identifying many different kinds of fools and folly in contemporary society.
One of the best known works of this kind, and an early modern European bestseller, is Das Narrenschiff (‘The Ship of Fools’) by the German humanist Sebastian Brant. Originally published in Basel in 1494, by 1500 it had already gone through 13 German editions. A Latin translation formed the basis for French, Dutch and English editions in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.
Fools sailing to Narragonia, from a 1499 Basel edition of Sebastian Brandt’s Narrenschiff (British Library IA.37957)
Brant describes various kinds of fools who fill the eponymous ship on its journey to ‘Narragonia’, a land of fools. First among them is the pseudo-scholar who surrounds himself with books that he can neither read nor understand. His picture is one of the most famous in the book, and very popular with bibliographers (one hopes with a degree of self-deprecation!). Others include slavish followers of fashion, those consumed by self-love or pride, believers in astrology, and those who eat, drink or pursue sports and games to excess.
The book collector with his useless library
Some of the book’s instances of folly are still the subject of complaints (just or unjust) today: students who should be working hard but instead spend their time in dissolute pursuits, parents who set their children an bad example, people who waste time pursuing long, complex and futile legal cases. I always think that the fool who takes all the world’s troubles on his shoulders and falls under the weight [below] is a salutary example for todays’s overstretched workers.
Other examples are more firmly of Brant’s own time. He castigates those who mock God, fail to observe holy days or bring their hounds and falcons to church. He classes all non-Christians (and Christian ‘heretics’) as fools. And one of his earliest examples of a fool is the parent or teacher who spares the rod and spoils the child; the woodcut shows his children turning on each other as he sits blindly by:
If Brant’s book has a moral and didactic purpose, the pill is sweetened by his lively rhymes in ‘knittelvers’ form and the woodcut illustrations. Many readers no doubt simply enjoyed the book as an entertainment and, rather than seeing themselves in Brant’s ‘mirror of fools’ and mending their ways, identified the follies of their neighbours and felt smug.
The foolish parents who set their child a bad example
But like the successful April Fool’s joke, Brant’s examples can make us wise by making us appreciate our own gullibility. As he states his introduction, “Wer sich für eyn narren acht / Der ist bald zů eym wisen gemacht” (“He who recognises himself as a fool will soon become a wise man”).
So if anyone catches you out today, just accept that it’s made you a little bit wiser.
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections
20 March 2015
Visions in the sky: a 17th-century eclipse
Today people in some parts of northern Europe will see a total solar eclipse. Others, including those here in London, will see the sun partially obscured.
Eclipses are a source of excitement in our age. Hotels in the regions where today’s eclipse is total were no doubt booked up months ago by keen eclipse-hunters, as happened in 1999 when a total eclipse was visible in many parts of Europe. But although the science behind eclipses has been understood since ancient times, in the pre-modern age knowledge could be tempered with superstition even among scholars. For the less learned, eclipses, like other celestial phenomena, were sources of amazement and terror, interpreted as portents or omens of disaster. Perhaps this is why early witnesses claimed to see in such phenomena exaggerated images of mythical, divine or demonic figures.
The seven Capuchin monks who set out walk from Ober-Laibach (modern-day Vrhnika in Slovenia) to Loitsch (Logatec) on 28 January 1664 would not have been uneducated men, but when they witnessed that day’s partial solar eclipse, they saw in it a series of bizarre visions. They left an account of these, which the British Library holds in two different broadside versions.
1) Aigentliche Beschreibung der erschröcklichen Wunderzeichen, so seyn gesehen worden ... über ... Laibach ... den 28. Januarij 1664. Jahrs. (s.l., [1664]) 1875.d.4.(26)
2) Warhaffter und glaubwürdiger Bericht, eines erschrecklichen Wunderzeichen, so sich ... bey Ober-Laybach ... ist gesehen worden ... (Nuremberg, [1664]) 1875.d.4.(29)
On their journey the monks were alerted by a traveller coming towards them to the fact that the sun looked strange. Looking up, they saw on the sun’s face a tall, thin man followed by three smaller figures. Next a troop of infantry appeared, which gave way to two church towers. These were replaced by “two mighty black men on horseback” and a host of other riders, all shooting. At this the monks “began to sigh, pray and cry fervently to God for help” until the riders disappeared. Finally another rider appeared, this one “all white and light”, stronger and more terrifying than the first two, also leading a host of riders who almost covered the sun. These fought for a quarter of an hour, while the monks redoubled their prayers. After they vanished the sun “was blue in the centre and bloody all around the edges” and did not shine for some two hours.
Detail of 1875.c.4.(29) showing the sequence of visions described
After his dramatic description, we might expect the writer to offer some kind of interpretation of these fearsome visions, but he simply says “This was the moon which became lost in the sun” and ends his account. Clearly he understood the basic nature of the event the party had seen, yet he is no more interested in giving a scientific explanation than an allegorical one. The account thus seems caught between the worlds of belief in signs and wonders and of rational scientific knowledge.
But there is perhaps a rational explanation for the visions which the monks saw. Today we are always issued with firm instructions about how to view an eclipse safely, but our 17th-century travellers would have been looking directly at the sun, risking serious damage to their eyes, and certainly causing them to see spots which imagination could turn into visions.
Don’t try this at home: the monks’ highly dangerous eclipse-viewing technique. Detail from 1875.d.4.(29)
So if you are watching today’s eclipse, watch safely, and enjoy the reality of one of the sky’s most fascinating sights without the terrifying and harmful visions.
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Studies
11 March 2015
Notes from an Old Profession
Attempts to regulate the sex trade are almost as old as the trade itself. Most cultures and societies, while openly deploring prostitution, have nonetheless tolerated it and, increasingly, tried to bring it under some form of governmental control. A recent British Library acquisition sheds light on one such attempt in 19th-century Hamburg:
Regulativ für die Bordell-Wirthe und eingezeichneten Mädchen in der Vorstadt St. Pauli ([Hamburg], 1853) RB.23.a.36389.
Like many port cities, Hamburg had a long history of prostitution and the city authorities had been issuing regulations for brothels and their employees since at least the 15th century. By the mid-19th century a set of regulations dating from 1834 were in force, but in 1847 some additional rules were issued by Dr A. Meier, ‘Patron’ of the suburb of St Pauli, then as now home to Hamburg’s main red light district. Our recently-acquired copy of these rules was printed in 1853, and each ‘girl’ (as they are always referred to here) in a brothel was to be given a copy. A label on the front wrapper shows that ours belonged to one Johanna Maria Friederica Wendland who worked “bei Brackert” (presumably the name of the brothel-keeper).
The wrapper of our copy of the Regulativ with the names of Johanna Wendland and “Brackert”
The 22 short paragraphs set out various rights and responsibilities. Brothel-keepers must provide a heated communal room in the winter (§13) and “simple, good food” (§15; specifically there must be no stinting on the morning coffee!). The women must be allowed free time to go out at least once a week (§17) although they must not wear “conspicuous” clothing that draws attention to their profession on these outings. Importantly, paragraph 18 states that “No girl may be forced to sleep with a man who is not acceptable to her.”
Many of the regulations are concerned with finances. Brothel-keepers may not advance more than 150 marks in credit to the women (§1). They can take up to half of a woman’s earnings (§2), but if she earns more than 50 marks in a week she need only hand over 25 (§3). Brothel-keepers cannot lay claim to gifts given to the women by clients (§9), and must not accept or demand gifts from the women (§10). The women must pay a monthly fee for such luxuries as a sofa (§8) or individual heating (§14) in their own rooms. A central kitty is to be maintained to help with extra expenses, such as clothing and travel costs for women who leave the brothel to return home, marry or take up another job (§19-20).
The seven pages of regulations are followed by 16 blank account-book pages. Paragraph 5 requires each woman’s copy to be filled in regularly by the brothel-keeper with a note of each month’s expenses. Paragraph 6 adds that a doctor must also sign each month’s page to certify that the woman is in good health.
An anonymous study of prostitution in Hamburg, first published in 1858 and reissued in a much enlarged edition in 1860, sheds light on some of the reasons behind these regulations. The author states that brothel-keepers regularly advance huge amounts of credit for clothing and other expenses (including gifts for themselves) to the women in their establishments, thus keeping the women effectively trapped in debt and unable to leave the brothel. Over a decade after the first publication of Dr Maier’s regulations, this commentator is clearly cynical about their effectiveness. He also doubts that many doctors have time for the regular health checks required.
However, a doctor did authorize our copy. Either Johanna Wendland herself or Brackert filled in two pages of accounts for September and October 1855, noting purchases including collars, a pair of boots and a velvet dress. The doctor signed it with the brief note “gesehen” on 6 October and 2 November.
The first page of Johanna Wendland's accounts and medical certification for September/October 1855
After this the entries cease and we can only speculate what happened. Did Johanna leave the brothel, and if so was it for another brothel, for the streets, or for a different employment or even marriage? Did she fall victim to disease, or to a violent client? Or did she or Brackert simply fall out of the habit of keeping the records while the authorities failed to enforce their well-meaning regulations, proving the cynic right? Whatever the case, Johanna’s brief accounts leave a slight but intriguing trace of a real woman working in the 19th-century sex trade.
References/further reading:
Die Hamburger Prostitution, oder die Gehemnisse des Dammthorwalles und der Schwiegerstrasse (Altona, 1858) 08282.f.20. (Zweite, vielfach ergänzte und durch Zusätze vermehrte Auflage (Altona, 1860) 12553.c.39.)
Jürgen Kahmann / Hubert Lanzerath, Weibliche Prostitution in Hamburg (Hamburg, 1981) X.529/61878
Ariane Barth, Die Reeperbahn: der Kampf um Hamburgs sündige Meile (Hamburg, 1999) YA.2001.a.41623
Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Studies
13 February 2015
‘Of all fairy-tales, the most beautiful…’ Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine
It would seem unlikely that one of the most ethereal creatures to capture the imagination of translators and illustrators in the nineteenth century should have been created by a Prussian officer and inspired by the writings of Paracelsus, the founder of the science of toxicology. Nevertheless, this was the pedigree of Undine, the heroine of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s romance of the same name, who would inspire operas, ballets and numerous adaptations. Her elusive form can be glimpsed behind Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ and Dvořák’s Rusalka, a symbol of all that is mysteriously enchanting and ultimately unattainable.
Fouqué, born in 1777 into a family of Huguenot origins, was the grandson of one of Frederick the Great’s generals, and although he had not planned a military career he gave up his studies at the university of Halle in 1794 to fight in the campaign against Napoleon which ended in 1806 with Prussia’s defeat by the French forces at the battle of Jena and Auerstedt. However, the years which followed saw a remarkable renaissance in Prussia’s cultural and political life, and after the magical interval of seven years, Napoleon suffered defeat at the hands of Prussia and her allies in the ‘Battle of the Nations’ at Leipzig in 1813.
Portrait of Fouqué in military uniform, ca 1815, artist unknown (Image from Wikimedia Commons)
Among the notable events of 1811 were the foundation of the new University of Berlin and the publication of one of the best-loved works of German fantasy and the only one of its author’s writings to be familiar to readers two centuries later. Undine appeared as the work of ‘the author of the Todesbund’, in a modest little book of which the British Library holds a first edition (Hirsch III.852). It contains no illustrations, but this lack would soon be made good by distinguished artists including John Tenniel (1457.d.19) and Arthur Rackham. Among the German artists drawn to illustrate the story was Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld, in a series of twenty-two exquisite images.
Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld ‘Des Ritters Trauung mit Undinen’ from XX. Umrisse zur Undine von Friedrich Baron de la Motte Fouqué (Leipzig, 1816) 1322.m.79.
The legend was ideally suited to the taste of the early 19th century and to artists like the members of the Lukasbund, fired by ideals of mediaeval chivalry and craftsmanship. Like the French legend of Mélusine, it tells of a water-sprite, Undine, who can gain an immortal soul only through marriage to a mortal. Living under the care of a fisherman and his wife in a simple hut, she is discovered by the knight Huldbrand when he is on a quest in the forest to fulfil a mission for Berthalda, whom he has seen at a tournament and whose glove he light-heartedly requested as a favour. A fateful meeting with Kühleborn, the shape-changing guardian and uncle of Undine, sets events in motion; Huldbrand marries Undine, but when she reveals that Berthalda is in fact the daughter of the fisherman, tensions arise between the three, and Kühleborn emerges from the River Danube to snatch Undine to safety. Thinking that he has lost her for ever, Huldbrand prepares to marry Berthalda despite attempts to dissuade him, unaware of the terrible price of infidelity to his other-worldly bride. Sure enough, when Berthalda demands that the castle well be opened to wash away the freckles that reveal her plebeian background, Undine appears from the depths to give Huldbrand a last kiss which proves fatal to him.
Undine and Huldbrand, by Arthur Rackham, from Undine ... Adapted from the German by W. L. Courtney and illustrated by Arthur Rackham (London, 1909). 12410.h.21.
Within three years the story had been turned into an opera by E.T. A. Hoffmann, and in 1817 George Soane translated it into English, adapting it for the stage in 1821. In Vasily Zhukovsky’s Russian translation it became the basis for another opera by Tchaikovsky, and Margot Fonteyn created the title role in a ballet to a score by Hans Werner Henze (1957; Document Supply MUSIC W87/6573). Fouqué himself died in comparative obscurity in 1843, having lived to see Undine surpass all his other tales of the world of Norse mythology and mediaeval legend and become a bestseller throughout Europe.
Although, on the eve of St Valentine’s Day, this story may not appear to presage the happiest of outcomes, its enduring message of mystery and enchantment, which caused George MacDonald to declare ‘of all fairytales I know, I think Undine the most beautiful,’ is as irresistible as ever.
Susan Halstead, Curator Czech & Slovak
Title-page of an English edition of Undine, illustrated by Heywood Sumner (London, 1888). C.109.n.1.
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