Stay in the Loop
BSR publishes on a weekly schedule, with an email newsletter every Wednesday and Thursday morning. There’s no paywall, and subscribing is always free.
I hated you, I love you: Political lessons from Europe
Healing and history
Patrick D. Hazard
As I enter my 13th year as a "visitor" to Weimar, I finally comprehend the splendid woods of Europe instead of gawking at its disparate trees. Take a little story in the German tabloid Bild (Oct. 19) about the former German chancellor Helmut Kohl just receiving a Polish decoration (The Golden Bridge of Dialogues) for his work in reconciling the two countries after World War II.
The triangle staffs of adjacent Germany, France and Poland are constantly organizing conferences, exhibitions and awards under their corporate title Die Drei Ecke (The Three Corners). Serious Europeans are obsessed with avoiding a repetition of their destructive 20th Century. And Germans still regret the scandal of Nazism, long after they have embraced more civilized habits.
Or take the new exhibit in the Weimarer Kunsthalle, Kampf und Leid (Battle and Grief), of 110 items (out of 50,000!) from the Museum of the First World War in the tiny French village of Peronne near Amiens. At the press opening I asked the museum's director why such a small a place would have such a large collection. The answer was simple: the town's proximity to the Battle of the Somme, that most destructive event, analogous to the Battle of the Bulge in the Second World War. Paintings and drawings, posters and engravings, soldier-to-soldier weapons, a helmet with artillery damage, an American gas mask!
(My father, then 28, was a captain in the American Expeditionary Force, and he was gassed in that war. He abandoned his family when I was three, a victim of Paris whorehouses returned to marry a Catholic virgin, so I never talked to him about the war.)
Fighters and losers, on both sides
The diverse imagery touts the Germans as fighters, and losers. Ditto the French. No one wins in such carnage— an insight that's more significant than the current spat over the Euro.
Americans could emulate these Europeans by communicating with Canucks to the North and Mexis to the South, not to forget all Central and South Americans, almost all of whom have at one time or another felt the baton of our Marines and the perfidy of our banks.
The exhibition was borrowed from France by a new Weimar group called "Rendezvous with History," which will hold a conference during the exhibition on the "meaning" of the War. It's not to be confused with an idiotic recent replaying of Napoleon's battle here in 1806, an event repeated every five years. By the way, the French sent "soldiers" in order to make this farce more "real."
Joy at destruction
A mere 30 minutes by fast train from Weimar lies the medieval city of Naumburg , now simultaneously exhibiting the architecture and sculpture of the Naumburg Master. (His identity is unknown— I call him the Mystery Meister— because the legal papers on his 13th-Century work burned.) In the first two weeks, 150,000 visitors have crowded into these ecclesiastical grounds to savor a complex presentation.
This most expensive exhibition is co-funded by the German chancellor and the French president— a current investment against future follies. A most touching minifilm (one of many such visual aids replacing traditional captions) concerns the German military's joy at having destroyed Reims cathedral at the beginning of World War I, the place where French kings were crowned.
I've just spent two days exploring this exhibition's explanations of how German medieval cathedral builders learned how to do it, like the Naumburg Master, by apprenticing at Reims and other innovative  French churches. The two-volume catalogue (a steal at 50 euros) is so physically heavy that you may get a hernia from lifting it, but its trilingual captions tantalize you over the medieval exchanges between these cultures, which would later try to destroy each other (and inadvertently themselves). I have petitioned the Naumburg management to let me publish the English language captions as a book for my semi-literate, monolingual countrymen.
A tabloid, too
And I must tell you an astonishing cross-cultural development: Bild, the German tabloid best known for its front-page bulbous-busted broads, has just published a 20-volume collection of novels by Nobel Laureates translated into German (for 99 Euros, in a box for your mantel!).
Great literature is for joy, not drudgery. Ditto medieval cathedrals. We all need to be healed.♦
To read responses, click here.
The triangle staffs of adjacent Germany, France and Poland are constantly organizing conferences, exhibitions and awards under their corporate title Die Drei Ecke (The Three Corners). Serious Europeans are obsessed with avoiding a repetition of their destructive 20th Century. And Germans still regret the scandal of Nazism, long after they have embraced more civilized habits.
Or take the new exhibit in the Weimarer Kunsthalle, Kampf und Leid (Battle and Grief), of 110 items (out of 50,000!) from the Museum of the First World War in the tiny French village of Peronne near Amiens. At the press opening I asked the museum's director why such a small a place would have such a large collection. The answer was simple: the town's proximity to the Battle of the Somme, that most destructive event, analogous to the Battle of the Bulge in the Second World War. Paintings and drawings, posters and engravings, soldier-to-soldier weapons, a helmet with artillery damage, an American gas mask!
(My father, then 28, was a captain in the American Expeditionary Force, and he was gassed in that war. He abandoned his family when I was three, a victim of Paris whorehouses returned to marry a Catholic virgin, so I never talked to him about the war.)
Fighters and losers, on both sides
The diverse imagery touts the Germans as fighters, and losers. Ditto the French. No one wins in such carnage— an insight that's more significant than the current spat over the Euro.
Americans could emulate these Europeans by communicating with Canucks to the North and Mexis to the South, not to forget all Central and South Americans, almost all of whom have at one time or another felt the baton of our Marines and the perfidy of our banks.
The exhibition was borrowed from France by a new Weimar group called "Rendezvous with History," which will hold a conference during the exhibition on the "meaning" of the War. It's not to be confused with an idiotic recent replaying of Napoleon's battle here in 1806, an event repeated every five years. By the way, the French sent "soldiers" in order to make this farce more "real."
Joy at destruction
A mere 30 minutes by fast train from Weimar lies the medieval city of Naumburg , now simultaneously exhibiting the architecture and sculpture of the Naumburg Master. (His identity is unknown— I call him the Mystery Meister— because the legal papers on his 13th-Century work burned.) In the first two weeks, 150,000 visitors have crowded into these ecclesiastical grounds to savor a complex presentation.
This most expensive exhibition is co-funded by the German chancellor and the French president— a current investment against future follies. A most touching minifilm (one of many such visual aids replacing traditional captions) concerns the German military's joy at having destroyed Reims cathedral at the beginning of World War I, the place where French kings were crowned.
I've just spent two days exploring this exhibition's explanations of how German medieval cathedral builders learned how to do it, like the Naumburg Master, by apprenticing at Reims and other innovative  French churches. The two-volume catalogue (a steal at 50 euros) is so physically heavy that you may get a hernia from lifting it, but its trilingual captions tantalize you over the medieval exchanges between these cultures, which would later try to destroy each other (and inadvertently themselves). I have petitioned the Naumburg management to let me publish the English language captions as a book for my semi-literate, monolingual countrymen.
A tabloid, too
And I must tell you an astonishing cross-cultural development: Bild, the German tabloid best known for its front-page bulbous-busted broads, has just published a 20-volume collection of novels by Nobel Laureates translated into German (for 99 Euros, in a box for your mantel!).
Great literature is for joy, not drudgery. Ditto medieval cathedrals. We all need to be healed.♦
To read responses, click here.
Sign up for our newsletter
All of the week's new articles, all in one place. Sign up for the free weekly BSR newsletters, and don't miss a conversation.
