European studies blog: Popular culture

17 February 2016

Billiards is a noble game! Vignaux is the greatest player before God.

Maurice Vignaux (d. 17 February 1916) was twice world champion in the game of billiards, a man famous on both sides of the Atlantic for his prowess and his technical knowledge of the game. As the magazine Sporting Life described on the occasion of his death 100 years ago, ‘Vignaux was born in Frogonville [sic], in the South of France, in 1846. While a youth in Toulouse, where he was reared, he displayed talent for the game and attracted the attention of François Ubassy, one of the greatest players in France. With Ubassy as mentor, Vignaux made rapid progress, and in 1874 he came to the United States and in his introductory tournament became a champion, winning the first three ball tournament for the championship of America.’

Title-page and frontispiece portrait of Vignaux from Le Billiard (Paris, 1895) 7913.e.31.

Vignaux contributed to billiards in a further way. His hefty ‘traité du billiard’ entitled Le Billiard carries the enticing subtitle Théorie des effets – Coups de Série – Détermination du point du choc – Quantité de bille – Différence entre le point de choc et le pont visé – Angle de déviation – Visé special des coups de finesse. It is an illustrated manual for the game detailing the logic behind impact, angles of deviation, strike zones, as well as all possible shots in billiards as it was developed up until that point. The 200 pictorial representations of games scenarios make this 400-page book a not uninteresting read for the uninitiated. As a word of warning, H. Desnar, who wrote the preface, suggests that although ‘it does not contain transcendental mathematics […] a veritable attention is necessary to grasp all the demonstrations.’

Diagrams and explanations of game scenarios from Le Billiard

If anything, this curio, written by a ‘great player before God’ in the words of Desnar, serves to show the taste for such a work amongst a certain demographic at a particular time. The British Library’s copy has a handwritten note on the inside (right) putting it in the possession of a British captain stationed in the Persian Gulf in 1910. Perhaps it was still in his possession a few years later during wartime. If so, Charles Darwin’s alleged resort to billiards in order to ‘drive the horrid species out of his head’ might have been the same experience our captain found in Vignaux’s study.

Pardaad Chamsaz, Collaborative Doctoral Student, British Library / University of Bristol

Posted by Susan Reed at 10:00 AM in France , Popular culture , Printed books , Rare books , Romance languages | Permalink | Comments( 0)

25 December 2015

The Stories of ‘Silent Night’

Few Christmas carols are better known and loved than ‘Stille Nacht’ / ‘Silent Night’, and probably none has such a familiar romantic tale attached to its origins. Most people know the story of how the church organ in the small town of Oberndorf near Salzburg was found to be broken on Christmas Eve 1818, and how the priest, Joseph Mohr, and organist, Franz Xaver Gruber, hastily wrote the words and melody of a song which could be performed to a guitar accompaniment instead.

Facsimile of a manuscript of ‘Stille Nacht’ made by Franz Xaver Gruber in 1836, from Alois Leeb, ‘Bibliographie des Weihnachtsliedes “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht”.’ Oberösterreichische Heimatblätter, Jg, 23 (1969). British Library 2737.eg.3.

This is partly true. The song was indeed written by Mohr and Gruber and first performed, to a guitar accompaniment, at Christmas 1818, but Mohr had in fact written the words two years earlier and the story of the damaged organ is speculation (besides, presumably there were existing carols which could have been sung to a guitar…).

The first published version of ‘Stille Nacht’, in three-verse form, from Vier ächte Tyroler-Lieder ... Gesungen von den Geschwistern Strasser aus dem Zillerthale.(Dresden, [1832?]) Hirsch M.1291.(18.)

Although the song quickly gained local popularity around Oberndorf, it was taken to a wider audience by two families of singers, the Strassers and the Rainers, who both came from another part of Austria, the Tyrolean Zillertal. The Strassers were glove-makers who started singing as a group to attract custom to their stall at the Leipzig Christmas fair. They were subsequently invited to perform at Christmas services and concerts in the city, and for a few years in the early 1830s they devoted themselves to a singing career, travelling around Germany with ‘Stille Nacht’ as a popular part of their repertoire. They cut Mohr’s original six verses down to three, and this is the form of the song that is known today and was first published in a collection of ‘authentic Tyrolean melodies’ as performed by the Strassers.

Title-page of Vier ächte Tyroler-Lieder... with a (probably fanciful) picture of the Strassers

Incidentally, the Strassers apparently first heard of ‘Stille Nacht’ from Carl Mauracher, an organ-builder who rebuilt the church organ at Oberndorf in 1825. Could his role in the transmission of the song have inspired the story of a broken organ forcing Mohr and Gruber to improvise?

The Rainers were a more professional and longer-lived group. They travelled beyond Germany, taking ‘Stille Nacht’ to international audiences, including America, where they toured from 1839 to 1843, and where the first English translation of the song appeared in 1849. Ten years later the most familiar English version was published by an American Episcopal priest, John Freeman Young.

Fascimile signatures of the Rainer Family Singers, from an edition of ‘Tyrolese melodies’ published in London (R.M.13.f.22.). The signatures guaranteed that this was an authentic and approved edition, evidence of the Rainers’ more professional and businesslike approach to their singing career.

Like the Strassers, the Rainers were advertised as singing traditional Tyrolean songs, and ‘Stille Nacht’ was not attributed to either Mohr or Gruber in its earliest publications. The melody was generally thought to be either a Tyrolean folk-tune or the work of Michael Haydn. In 1854 the Prussian Court Chapel in Berlin wrote to St Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg asking for clarification; the letter found its way to Gruber who wrote an account of the song’s origins, identifying Mohr as author and himself as composer, although a printed score in the British Library (F.1171.mm.(22.)) attributes the tune to Michael Haydn as late as 1921.

A facsimile of Gruber’s report of 1854, explaining the origins of ‘Stille Nacht’, from Max Gehmacher, Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht! Das Weihnachtslied, wie es entstand, und wie es wirklich ist (Salzburg, 1937) 11858.c.95

Despite Gruber’s efforts, legends and misinformation continued to accumulate around the song. A completely untrue claim that Mohr translated the words from Latin dates from 1899 and was still being quoted nearly a century later. The story has been fictionalised several times and there have been film and theatre adaptations, all adding various romantic subplots and embellishments to the original tale, many of which can be found today presented as truth on the Internet and elsewhere.

But none of this mythology would have accumulated without the song’s genuine popularity and power to move. For British audiences in particular it has gained in emotional impact by becoming linked with the story of the 1914 Christmas Truce (another true story around which many legends have been built), when British and German soldiers sang it together across the lines. It has been translated into over 300 languages and dialects, and in countries all round the world Christmas would not be Christmas without it. No wonder we love the story of its rise from humble origins to worldwide fame.

Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Studies

Posted by Susan Reed at 10:00 AM in Austria , Germanic , Music , Popular culture | Permalink | Comments( 0)

02 December 2015

The Emperor’s Big Nose: Frederic Justen and Napoleon III

This year marks the bicentennial of Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat at Waterloo and of the dramatic 100 days which preceded it. One of the many events organized to commemorate the historic event was put together by the British Museum, featuring its extensive collection of British satirical prints from the Napoleonic Era (1799 to 1815).

But we should not forget his nephew, the equally ambitious Louis-Napoleon, who was also a favourite object of mockery in satirical papers across Europe. Indeed, the large nose and moustache of Napoleon III (as he would anoint himself in December 1852) were internationally recognizable. The British Library houses a rich collection of Napoleon caricatures, including many German and French ones from the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), located at shelfmarks Cup.648.b.2, Cup.648.b.8, and 14001.g.41, and these collections have been the object of some very interesting research.

The British Library is also home to another collection of Napoleon caricatures that has yet to receive the scholarly attention it deserves. Napoléon III et la Caricature Anglaise [1761.a.12 and LR.22.b.20] is one of three collections of newspaper cuttings donated by Frederic Justen to the British Museum in the late 19th century. Justen, it has been surmised, was a German-born bookseller residing in Soho, probably of French Protestant origin. This collection, comprises three leather-bound volumes, complete with an official-looking title page that simply says ‘Londres, 1873’ and is adorned with the Napoleonic Seal. It is probable that Justen bound these volumes himself, because there is no British Museum stamp on the covers, and because the acquisition stamps are dated 1874, the year after the given date of publication.

As the title suggests, the collection is composed of clippings from various British satirical newspapers, mostly Punch [P.P.5270.ah], which feature reports, poems, caricatures and other humoristic ways of representing Napoleon III’s rise and fall from power between 1848 and 1871. For the purposes of concision, I have focused only on the first volume, which covers 1848 to 1860. First elected president in December 1848; gradually tightening his control over both government and the press; staging a coup d’état in December 1851; and finally declaring himself Emperor one year later; Napoleon’s power grab took place in such a piecemeal manner that the average Frenchman going about his daily life may not have realized the significance of what was happening.

It is unlikely that Justen, just 16 years old in 1848, was collecting these news items as they appeared. Instead, he probably began looking through back issues of satirical magazines in or around 1871, perhaps searching for a narrative to explain the extraordinary events of the end of the Empire, such as the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. By selecting only certain items, and leaving out the many other important events reported in the news during that period, Justen altered the temporality of the narrative. This sort of reorganization of events in time in order to give them coherence and direction is what Paul Ricoeur has famously termed “emplotment.”

‘Ups and downs of Political Life’, Punch vol. 16, p. 118

For example, near the beginning of the volume, the reader finds a fairly mirthful 1848 sketch of Louis-Philippe and Louis-Napoleon titled ‘Ups and Downs of Political Life’ (above); but the imagery and the language of the cuttings suddenly become much darker just a few pages later. ‘The Modern Damocles’ (below), a caricature from December 1851, depicts the newly appointed ‘President for Life,’ perched miserably on his throne, a menacing sword hanging over his head. By placing the two events nearly side-by-side, Justen establishes an almost teleological account of Louis-Napoleon’s rise and fall from power.

‘The Modern Damocles’, Punch vol. 21, p. 260

A desire for a narrative of the Empire is also evident in the way that the collector assembled his book, although it is often hard to figure out just exactly what he was trying to convey with his choices. For instance, Volume I begins with a cutting from 1864 (below) featuring Mr. Punch acting as a peep-show animator, with a line of foreign dignitaries queuing up to see the show.

While Napoleon is among the audience, he is neither more nor less important than the other guests, which include Otto von Bismarck, Abraham Lincoln, and the Pope. This frontispiece serves as an introduction to the entire collection, so why choose an image where Napoleon features so vaguely? I am tempted to guess that Justen is making a statement about himself, calling attention to the similarities between his own act of constructing a narrative – presenting history as a spectacle – and the voyeuristic art-form of the peep-show.

As is often the case, this collection provides as much information about the collector as the collected objects, and it brings up more questions than answers. The figure of Frederic Justen is intriguing. Who was this German-born bookseller living in London, and why did he take the time to put together these volumes? Why did he carefully cut out and paste his texts and images in this particular way? Why did he choose the items he did (a quick perusal of Punch shows some blatant omissions)? While some of these mysteries are unsolvable, there is a great deal of cultural insight to be found in these volumes, which clearly deserve more attention than they have thus-far received.

Rebecca Powers, University of Warwick

References/Further Reading

Morna Daniels, ‘Caricatures from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the Paris Commune’ Electronic British Library Journal (2005)

W. Jack Rhoden, ‘French caricatures of the Franco-Prussian War and Commune at the British Library’ FSLG Annual Review issue 6 (2009-2010), pp.22-24

Richard Scully, ‘The Cartoon Emperor: The Impact of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte on European Comic Art, 1848–1870’ European Comic Art (2011), pp. 147-180. ZC.9.a.8279

Teresa Vernon, ‘Napoleon III meets his nemesis: caricatures from the Franco-Prussian War’ British Library European Studies Blog (24 June 2014)

Posted by Susan Reed at 10:00 AM in France , History , Politics , Popular culture , Romance languages , Visual arts | Permalink | Comments( 0)

01 December 2015

Two bad boys, seven pranks and one children’s classic

The British Library is currently marking the 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland with an exhibition, but Alice is not the only children’s classic to turn 150 this year. In Germany the focus has been on Wilhelm Busch’s much-loved Max und Moritz. Busch published a number of illustrated, rhymed tales in the course of his career, but this was the most successful and enduring.

The story tells how bad boys Max and Moritz terrorise their small village with seven ‘pranks’. First they kill Widow Bolte’s chickens, and when the widow tries to make the best of things by roasting the birds, the boys’ second prank is to steal them from the oven.

Widow Bolte mourns her chickens (above) and the boys steal the roasting birds (below). From Wilhelm Busch, Max und Moritz: eine Bubengeschichte in sieben Streichen (Munich, [1930]) 011528.m.97.

Next they lure the local tailor onto a bridge which they have sawn through so that he falls into the stream:

For two such bad boys a teacher is an obvious target, and in the fourth prank they fill schoolmaster Lämpel’s pipe with gunpowder:

Prank five is tame by comparison: they put cockchafers in Uncle Fritz’s bed:

Things start to go wrong in prank six, when the boys try to steal from a bakery. They fall into the dough and are baked themselves, but miraculously survive and eat their way out of their crusts:

However, their seventh prank is their last: they cut holes in a farmer’s grain sacks, but the farmer catches them and takes the boys to the mill instead of his spilt grain. There they are ground into meal and eaten by the miller’s geese:

And nobody in the village is sorry.

Busch tells his story in lively and witty verses, accompanied by his own illustrations. Like Heinrich Hoffmann’s earlier Struwwelpeter, the book can be seen as a forerunner of the modern comic strip – something borne out in the case of Max und Moritz by the fact that the early American cartoon strip The Katzenjammer Kids was inspired at least in part by Busch’s story and characters.

After a slow initial reception, Max und Moritz soon became established as a classic in Germany. The stories, and in particularly their illustrations, are still much reproduced and instantly recognisable. There have also been many parodies and imitations of the work, the latter including a ‘Max und Moritz for girls’ by Wilhelm Herbert entitled Maus und Molli, first published in 1925. This has been reissued for the anniversary of the original, attracting a review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, cleverly written with the same metre and rhymes as Busch’s and Herbert’s stories.

An advertisement for Maus und Molli from the 1930 edition of Max und Moritz

An English translation first appeared 1871, and while Max und Moritz never became as popular with British audiences as Struwwelpeter and is currently out of print in the UK, there were a number of English translations, including one by Arundell Esdaile, more famous as a bibliographer, librarian and historian of the British Museum Library (sadly, alone among translators, Esdaile drops the trochaic tetrameter form which gives the original verses much of their vivacity). The British Library also holds two translations into Scots dialects, where the heroes become ‘Dod and Davie’ or ‘Jarm an Jeemsie’.

The cover of Arundell Esdaile’s English translation (London, [1913]) 11650.i.43.

Indeed, translations of the book into local dialects and smaller or ancient languages seem surprisingly common. As with several children’s classics (including Struwwelpeter and Alice) there have been various Latin versions. The British Library holds a Yiddish version (Shmul und Shmerke), and a study published in 1997 lists over a hundred versions in various German dialects, although some were published in, and perhaps written for, specific anthologies of such translations. There seem to be plenty of academic linguists who are Busch enthusiasts, most notably Manfred Görlach who edited The True Story of Max und Moritz, a clever pastiche of philological studies which traces the ‘textual tradition’ of the story back to ancient Egypt and includes versions in early languages including Gothic, Anglo-Saxon and Old English.

Translations of Max und Moritz into Yiddish, Latin and Scots dialect

Max und Moritz may not mean much to a British audience in its centenary year, but it is certainly not forgotten in Germany, and for the curious Anglophone reader, it is worth taking a look at a translation to find out why the Germans still enjoy this tale of boys behaving badly.

Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Studies

References/further reading

Wilhelm Busch, Max und Moritz polyglott (Munich, 1994) YA.1998.a.2931. [The original text with English, French, Spanish, Italian and Latin translations]

Wilhlem Busch, Dod and Davie, translated by J.K. Annand (Edinburgh, 1986) YC.1986.a.409.

Wilhlem Busch, Jarm an Jeemsie. A tale o twa reebalds in seven pairts, owreset ta Shetlandic bi Derick Herning (Lerwick, 1984) YK.1994.a.1497

Wilhelm Busch, Max und Moritz auf jiddisch: eine Bubengeschichte in sieben Streichen = Shmul un Shmerke : a Mayse mit Vayse-Khevrenikes in Zibn Shpitslekh, ibergezetst fun daytsh durkh Shmoyl Naydorf un Leye Robinson ; aroysgegebn fun Walter Sauer. (Nidderau, 2000) YF.2009.a.21510

Manfred Görlach, Max und Moritz in aller Munde: Wandlungen eines Kinderbuches: eine Ausstellung in der Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Köln, 27. Juni-30. September 1997 (Cologne, 1997) YA.2000.a.19624

The true story of Max and Moritz: ancient and medieval texts before W. Busch, very critically edited by Manfred Görlach ; with contributions by Walter Arndt ... [et al.] (Cologne, 1997) YA.2002.a.4065.

Posted by Susan Reed at 2:33 PM in Comics-unmasked , Germanic , Germany , Popular culture | Permalink | Comments( 0)

19 October 2015

The Goats that Got Away

As one of the co-curators for our current Animal Tales exhibition, one of the most enjoyable parts of the process was selecting the exhibits. An opportunity to spend time exploring the collections, to revisit the known but also to make new discoveries, is a stimulating part of the work. One of the frustrations was that, with such a broad subject area, we were not able to include all the items we might have liked. There were inevitably some that ‘got away’. One such, a personal childhood favourite, was the story of the Three Billy-Goats Gruff. It comes from the compendium of Norwegian folk tales collected and edited by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe in the 19th century. These tales are much-loved classics in Norway, printed in many editions over the years.

Detail from the cover of the 1874 edition of Norske Folke-Eventyr (Christiania [Oslo], 1874) 12430.dd.6

The story’s original Norwegian title in full (a bit less snappy than the English one we know) was De tre Bukkene Bruse, som skulde gaa til Sæters og gjøre seg fede which roughly translates as ‘The three Billy-Goats Gruff who were going to mountain pastures to fatten themselves up’. ‘Bruse’, which is the name of the goats, was translated as ‘Gruff’ in the first English version, and this translation has stuck ever since but in fact the word refers to the hairy tuft on a goat’s forehead, as shown on the splendidly regal goat below, illustrated by Otto Sinding in an 1896 edition.

Illustration from Norske Folke- og Huldre-Eventyr (Copenhagen, 1896) 12431.f.44.

The story was originally published in Christiania (as Oslo was called at that time) in 1843 in the third of four parts of Norske Folkeeventyr (Norwegian folk tales).

The first English translation came in 1859 in Popular Tales from the Norse by G. W. Dasent. It was also included in the shorter, illustrated edition in 1862, A Selection from the Norse Tales for the use of children. From an introductory note in this edition it becomes clear that the subtitle ‘for the use of children’ has been very deliberately chosen. Dasent muses regretfully that ‘this selection has been made to meet the scruples of those good people who thought some of The Norse Tales too outspoken for their children’. Luckily for us, The Three Billy Goats Gruff was not one of those considered unsuitable for Victorian tastes and, unlike most of the stories in the collection, it has continued to enjoy popularity in this country down to the present day.

Illustration from A Selection from the Norse tales for the use of children (Edinburgh, 1862) 12431.d.29.

Like many of the items featured in Animal Tales, this is a story about animals that allows the teller and the listener to explore some very human situations and emotions. The Three Billy Goats Gruff has echoes of other European folk tales of the time on a very similar theme, such as the Grimm brothers’ Little Red Riding Hood: in essence it is the story of a journey during which the protagonists pass from danger to safety.

Illustration from Norske Folke- og Huldre-Eventyr (12431.f.44)

And the story itself? The action unfolds as follows: three goats of different sizes, small, medium and large, have to cross a bridge on their way to pasture. Under the bridge lurks a fearsome troll intent on gobbling them up. The first two goats get over by promising bigger goats to come. The final, largest, goat confronts the troll and sees him off in style, with the following words (in Dasent’s lively translation):

Well, come along! I’ve got two spears,
And I’ll poke your eyeballs out at your ears;
I’ve got besides two curling stones,
And I’ll crush you to bits, body and bones

So what made the story so appealing to my younger self? In part it was the satisfaction of the goats outwitting the troll, in part it was the structure of the plot, simple, but with clever use of repetition (the presence of ‘three’ being a recognised feature of folk tales). I remember too what fun it was to hear the story being read aloud. This is, after all, a story that was preserved for many years as part of an oral tradition. The narrator can do a lot with the goats’ voices which are described as rising in volume according to the size of the goat. Stamping one’s feet to echo the sound of the goats tramping over the bridge and joining in with the roar of the troll, brings a mounting intensity to the story which culminates in the thrill of the troll’s resounding defeat!

Barbara Hawes, Curator Germanic Collections

Posted by Olga Kerziouk at 10:00 AM in Animal Tales , Germanic , Norway , Popular culture | Permalink | Comments( 0)

18 September 2015

‘Fables of another type’: some Animal Tales from Russia

Very few people now know the name of Ivan Ivanovich Bashmakov (?-1865) or his pen-name Ivan Vasenko. Even fewer can remember reading anything by him. A prolific Russian writer, he published novels, fairy tales, short stories, books for children, and even patriotic tracts (e.g., Enemies of the Holy Russia about the siege of Sebastopol), primers and textbooks for learners.

In literary encyclopaedias Bashmakov is described as an author of popular literature for common people. Critics agree that he was best known for his fables in verses (first published in 1854), which although not masterpieces, were lively, witty and funny.

The tradition of fables had been established in Russia by Mikhail Lomonosov, Ivan Krylov, Ivan Dmitriev and others, and Bashmakov successfully followed their steps, although supplied his book Semeinye prikliucheniia zhivotnykh (‘Animals’ family stories’; British Library 12304.c.8) with a subtitle: ‘basni inogo roda’ (‘fables of another type’). The book consists of two parts with a small appendix of three fables ‘Mysli i chuvstva rastenii’ (‘Thoughts and Feelings of plants’).

Bashmakov’s imagination took him on a trip of discovery of human features in almost every living creature: Goat’s valour, Bear’s taste, Crawfish’s heroism, Bumblebee’s wish, Cat’s melancholy, Piglet’s annoyance, Cricket’s dignity, Jackdaw’s gossip, Sparrow’s anger, Mouse’s impulse, etc. However, only two out of four lithographed images illustrate animals other than perfectly domesticated cats and dogs. Here is one:

Although the fable tells a story of a Hare who, having overheard a conversation between an Elephant and a Lion, realised that all have their own weaknesses (as Lion was afraid of mice, he was afraid of dogs), it looks as if the illustrator decided to ignore the ‘main hero’ altogether. The two animals are of the same size and it is obvious that the artist had been trained to draw lions as they appeared in the European visual tradition, but had almost no idea how to approach drawing an elephant. Maybe, that is why the elephant is well hidden in the bushes?

The picture above illustrates the fable called ‘Snake’s tenderness’. You can probably guess already that instead of a kiss for fantastic singing a Skylark got poisoned.

In the pictures that accompany the tales, ‘Dog’s instructions’ about an old female Dog recalling a story of her love and ‘Dog’s fate’ that, by comparing cats’ and dogs’ life in one household, concludes that we should to be happy with what we have, not wishing to obtain another fate, people clearly dominate the scene.

Maybe, the artist really liked cats, as he supplied ‘Dog’s fate’ with one more picture, featuring a cat:

Quite unlike other images where animals were portrayed without any impersonation that was prompted by the text of the fables, only one cat in the whole book looks like a lady.

Can you imagine that this lady-Kitty in the fable ‘Cat’s sensibility’ interrupts her aria to her beloved Pussycat to catch a mouse? Oh, no!!! But will you drop your love song when your iPhone notifies you of new pictures on friend’s Instagram?

Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator East European Collections

Posted by Susan Reed at 10:00 AM in Animal Tales , Animals , Popular culture , Russia , Slavonic | Permalink | Comments( 0)

Tags: Fables , Ivan Ivanovich Bashmakov

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

Posted by Susan Reed at 10:00 AM in France , Germany , Literature , Popular culture | Permalink | Comments( 0)

22 May 2015

Sequins, songs and sociopolitical change - 60 years of Eurovision

With the Eurovision Song Contest celebrating its 60th anniversary, and still regularly attracting around 200 million viewers, this year presents a great opportunity to look beyond the glitz of modern Eurovision and consider the changes in European culture, society and politics which it reflects.

We must thank the Italian members of the European Broadcasting Union for the idea of the contest, originally conceived to help promote peace and harmony in a Europe still recovering from the Second World War. Since that first contest in 1956 in Lugano, Switzerland between seven participating countries, it has expanded to include as many as 43 entries in the record year of 2008; now qualifying rounds are required before the grand finals.

Map of countries participating in the contest and the years they first took part (picture from Wikimedia Commons)

How amazed those Italian broadcasters, whose stated mission was to “stimulate the output of original high- quality songs in the field of popular music by encouraging competition between authors and composers through the international comparison of their works,” would be to see the power of YouTube, enabling viewers to compare in seconds the first ever winner, Switzerland’s Lys Assia singing Refrain, with Conchita Wurst’s winning Rise like a Phoenix for Austria in 2014.

Eurovision Song Contest 1958 - Lys Assia.png Above: 1956 Eurovision winner Lys Assia (image from Beeld en Geluidwiki via Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0). Below: 2014 winner Conchita Wurst (Photo: Albin Olsson, via Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY-SA-3.0)

As a child of mixed heritage growing up in a small, monocultural English city, I loved the reporting of votes from the national juries even more than the songs – seeing the glamorous multilingual presenters, usually framed by an iconic national landmark first gave me a sense that I fitted in somewhere as a European and really inspired me to study foreign languages. Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the closed doors of those national juries? Wonder no more! Via the EU Screen portal you can now see the terribly solemn 1976 Belgian jury deliberating at length over a nice cup of tea and contributing to one of the highest scores ever for a winning entry – the UK’s Brotherhood of Man’s inimitable Save Your Kisses for Me.

Everyone will have their favourite Eurovision moments and associations, but there is far more to this event than sequins, folk-costumes and cheesy songs. On one level, Eurovision can be viewed as consolidating nationalistic stereotypes, but by encouraging viewers to encounter Europe in their living rooms it can also be seen as contributing to a sense of a common European identity. It is family viewing for today’s European family in all its diversity – gay and straight, old and young – all sharing the same experience but bringing their own readings to it. This European identity is then projected further afield with many enthusiastic viewers around the world – the contest is so popular in Australia that in this anniversary year Australia’s Guy Sebastian will be a guest participant.

Winners of the 2015 second semi-final, with a range of national flags on stage and in the audience (photo from EUROVISION/EBU, © Andres Putting (EBU))

Through the prism of Eurovision we can also see the changing shape of Europe. In the 1990s there was a rapid expansion of participants from Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The socialist countries had previously held separate song contests, with only Yugoslavia breaking the mould by joining Eurovision in 1961. Viewers behind the Iron Curtain watched the annual Sopot Music Festival from Poland or its short-lived offshoot, the Intervision Song Contest. The Sopot Festival was the brainchild of Władysław Szpilman, the Polish Jewish musician immortalised in Roman Polanski’s film The Pianist, bringing singers from around the world to perform, initially at the Gdańsk shipyards, then moving along the coast to Sopot. Intervision/Sopot also attracted huge audiences not least because guest artistes such as Boney M were invited to play in the intervals.

By the 1990s participating in Eurovision was often a way for the new entrants to assert sovereignty, contribute to nation-building and project a particular national image around the world. Take for example Ukraine’s 2004 winning entry Wild Dances, performed by Ruslana and featuring a version of the dances, costumes and rituals of the Hutsul people from western Ukraine, which then came to represent universal Ukrainian folk traditions for international viewers.

Eurovision also brings its viewers face to face with key political issues facing contemporary Europe. One can learn much about regional and cultural alliances by observing voting patterns, or about linguistic politics within Europe, such as the rapid rise of English as a lingua franca, demonstrated by the fact that so many entries are now sung in English in order to reach the widest possible audience.

But perhaps one of the key reasons for Eurovision’s enduring success is the way in which it has come to symbolise diversity and tolerance, far exceeding the original hopes of the EBU. It can be seen to represent a certain stability and unity in the face of an increasingly fragmented Europe. To quote Conchita Wurst, who was welcomed in November 2014 by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon as an ambassador for human rights, “The Eurovision Song Contest is about love and respect for different languages, cultures and people, who in the end have more in common than differences”

Two of the many books about the Eurovision Song Contest in the British Library's collections

The British Library catalogue lists a huge range of resources relating to the Eurovision song contest – from books and academic articles, to audio and video recordings and archived websites. Some appear in unexpected places such as the article “ How does Europe Make Its Mind Up? Connections, cliques, and compatibility between countries in the Eurovision Song Contest” published in the scientific publisher Elsevier’s serial Physica A. (Vol. 360, No. 2, 2006, 576-598; British Library 6475.010000). However, not every author feels the love which Conchita Wurst refers to, as shown by S. Coleman’s article “ Why is the Eurovision Song Contest Ridiculous? Exploring a Spectacle of Embarrassment, Irony and Identity” in Popular communication (Vol 6, No. 3, 2008, 127-140; 6550.310000)

But whether they come to love or to mock, millions across the continent will be sitting down this Saturday evening to watch the contest once again.

Janet Zmroczek, Head of European and Americas Collections

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.

Posted by Susan Reed at 3:19 PM in European Literature Night , Germany , Literature , Popular culture , Translation | Permalink | Comments( 0)

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

Posted by Susan Reed at 9:30 AM in Germanic , Germany , Literature , Popular culture | Permalink | Comments( 0)

European studies blog

83 posts categorized "Popular culture"

Billiards is a noble game! Vignaux is the greatest player before God.

The Stories of ‘Silent Night’

The Emperor’s Big Nose: Frederic Justen and Napoleon III

Two bad boys, seven pranks and one children’s classic

The Goats that Got Away

‘Fables of another type’: some Animal Tales from Russia

The Passion of Christ considered as an uphill bicycle race… and what should women wear?

Sequins, songs and sociopolitical change - 60 years of Eurovision

Grimms’ tales in Translation (and in the British Library)

Every Day is Fools’ Day

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