Maggie's Farm

That's what Freud wrote on his Austrian exit papers, when the Gestapo informed him that he could finally leave if he would put in writing that he had been treated well by them in the lengthy process. The grim sarcasm, no doubt, went over the heads of the Gestapo thugs.

Freud had a wry sense of humor which was rarely evident in his writing. He was 82 at the time, the Anschluss had happened, and his friends like Ernest Jones had to drag him out of Vienna to London, with the assistance of Pres. Roosevelt.

Fearful as he was of growing anti-Semitic sentiment, he did not want to leave home.

The NYT announced his departure on June 5, 1938. He died a year later, in London.

Praising the Puritans, at First Things (h/t, AVI). Lawler begins:

There’s little less fashionable today than praising the Puritans, especially for their egalitarian political idealism, their promotion of genuinely humane and liberating learning, and their capacity for enjoyment and human happiness. Praising the Puritans is especially difficult for us because even most of our Protestants have abandoned them. When a European calls us Puritanical we don’t say, “yes, thanks a lot, you’re right.” Instead, we either deny it, saying we’re way beyond those days. Or we admit it, saying that, “yes, we should be less capitalistic, less repressed, and more free thinking, just like you.” But the truth is that the Puritans remain the chief source of the American difference—our ability to live freely and prosperously without unduly slighting the longings of our souls. It’s the Puritans’ idealism that made and even makes Americans civilized.

Read the whole thing. I do not know how, or whether, immigrants to the US can, or have been able to, or even want to, learn the code. I sure hope they can.

Picture is Jonathan Edwards, a member of the Maggie's Farm pantheon. You would not know from the prissy portrait, but he loved to have fun.

I am re-posting this because, as I slowly get through it (slowly because there is so much in it - I am reading it every night), I appreciate it more and more. Some of you cultural history types might put it on a Christmas list.

Another book I am reading, with far more pleasure than the gruesome After the Reich, is Peter Watson's The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century.

Since there was no real idea of "Germany" as a nation until 1817 (The Deutscher Bund), and no modern nation of Germany until 1871, the book is mostly about German culture (which preceded any German nation and which continues to exist beyond the boundaries of modern Germany - Austria, northeast Italy, Switzerland, the entire diaspora of German Jews, etc).

From the review in The Guardian:

So, is there a German genius? Of course there is. Even Borges never suggested that Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers could have been written in Spanish, or Einstein's "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter K�rper" in English. Of all the answers assembled by Watson, the clearest comes from the American philosopher John Dewey in 1915, who summed up German civilisation as a "self-conscious idealism with unsurpassed technical efficiency and organisation". By idealism, he meant a belief that behind appearances or phenomena is some super-reality, sometimes called Geist, sometimes called Wille, sometimes even Musik. Whatever it is called, it speaks accurate German.

His chapter on German Idealism is especially good. Hegel and his brethren inform our thinking today far more than I realized.

When Sipp and I exchanged emails about the charming house on the blog this morning, he decided to find out a bit about Moodus (where that house is). Here's the Moodus Wiki. (Moodus is a village in East Haddam, with a pop c. 1200 - depending on who is in jail or court-required rehab at a given moment).

What he discovered that was interesting to me was that Moodus was the smallest town in the US to receive federal urban renewal money in the 1960s. The old town center (pic below) was demolished.

The quaint village center, dubbed "Downtown Moodus", formerly located at the intersection of routes CT 151 and CT 149, was a popular destination for guests. However most of the village was razed after the citizens of East Haddam controversially voted in 1967 to accept Urban Renewal funding to rebuild Moodus commercial district a quarter mile east along CT 149.

The citizens immediately regretted their decision, but it was too late for the Dem-controlled Feds with their bulldozers and their developer allies.

The genius central planners had something more modern in mind (ie up-to-date strip malls), to be built 1/4 mile up the road. The soul of the village was killed. It's just one example of why we at Maggie's are so distrustful of genius government planners of anything. This ex-farming village, ex-middle-class resort village, is now a frequent hangout of ex-cons and cons-in-training, young gals without cars with too many tatts walking down the road to the minmart for chips, cigs, and beer, scruffy immigrants whose language one cannot identify, people on various dubious disabilities (as in nearby Middletown, CT), and abandoned or tumbling-down once-gracious homes with rooms for rent. Nobody goes to Moodus anymore, except to fill their gas tank.

Well, those "modern" renewal government-subsidized strips malls are now emptying, shabby, and falling down. Like, as I imagine it, "Pearly Nails" - boarded up. "Uncle Tsao's Quickee Chinee Takeout" - boarded up. "PIZZA POUR VOIS" - boarded up. (I'm sure there must be something good about Moodus still, but it's just a place on a map now, and not my sort of Yankee village anymore).

Thanks a lot, Uncle Sam, for modernizing Moodus. And thanks to you expert geniuses in DC who think you know better than us. See Detroit. And shame on the Connecticut Yankees who bought into such government baloney. The Feds rarely get anything right except through their military - thankfully, their main responsibility.

This site has some good posts on the topic of Moodus' destruction, including:

Pt 1. Legacy of "Progress" Gone Sour

Pt 2. Urban Renewal Flops in Moodus

Pt 3. Could Moodus Have Been Saved?

A quote:

Once the town opted for urban renewal funds, fixing up the town was no longer a viable solution. "With the influx of federal dollars, you had to play their game," explains Jim Gibbons, an urban planner with the UConn Extension Service in Haddam. "In order to accomplish smaller goals, you had to follow federal regulations and guidelines and at the time of the Moodus project urban renewal was oriented to demolition. To many critics of the program at the time, the correct title was ‘urban disruption.’ As an outsider, I think this was part of the problem with the Moodus project: It disrupted the neighborhood."

Here's a pic I took last weekend of an abandoned and boarded up church in (once) central Moodus.

I am reading - or trying to read - McDonogh's 2007 After The Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift. It's about the horrors inflicted on ethnic Germans by the Allies in the years following WW2. Prussia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany.

This is indeed a tale which nobody wants to hear, and it is gut-wrenching to read.

Probably 3 million ethnic Germans were killed after the war ended, including around one million surrendered soldiers. From Nigel Jones' excellent review:

The two million German civilians who died were largely the old, women and children: victims of disease, cold, hunger, suicide - and mass murder.

Apart from the well-known repeated rape of virtually every girl and woman unlucky enough to be in the Soviet occupation zones, perhaps the most shocking outrage recorded by MacDonogh - for the first time in English - is the slaughter of a quarter of a million Sudeten Germans by their vengeful Czech compatriots. The survivors of this ethnic cleansing, naked and shivering, were pitched across the border, never to return to their homes. Similar scenes were seen across Poland, Silesia and East Prussia as age-old German communities were brutally expunged.

Read the whole brief review to get an idea.

Seems to me that the Czechs were the most brutal and bloody to the Germans in the German-majority Sudetenland, but the Red Army was close behind. In this time period, the Czechs reduced their prosperous German population from 3 million to the handful today - ethnic cleansing by murder, torture, forced death marches, exile, and in concentration camps (the camps were widely used to incarcerate, starve, torture and kill Germans in the Red Army regions).

As I live and learn, I no longer view Roman civilization as "ancient." Old, but not ancient. Those folks were a lot like us, and lived a lot like us.

Roman floor mosaics and wall paintings were the usual fashionable decor of the time, and typical for the homes of the prosperous. Naturally, the floor mosaics are better preserved than wall mosaics or wall paintings.

In 2009 we were fortunate to make our way to the Bardo Museum in Tunis to see the world's largest collection of Roman mosaics. They have so many, you even walk on them to get from one display room to another. This was decor, mind you - not fine art.

The Lod mosaics are a recent find, very-well preserved. They are now displayed in NYC.

Here's the story of the Lod mosaics.

Came in over the transom with the video:

The P51 was the most versatile fighter plane of WW2. It excelled at both ground level support of the troops and high altitude long range fighter cover for the heavy bombers. It was the equal of the best fighter  planes in dog fights. It was also an accident of fate or timing rather than planning that it existed. 

In late 1940 or early '41 Britain was desperately short of fighter planes of any sort and  had sent some RAF people to the US to see what they could buy.  Hoping for some P-40's they talked with Curtis Wright and found them booked up for the duration by the US govmt. They got a tip from Curtis Wright that North American Aviation had no contracts yet and was looking for business, and that Curtis Wright would licence North American to build P-40's if they worked out an agreement.  When the RAF asked the North American small management crew if they would  be interested their answer was Why do you wand to buy an expensive, high priced obsolete plane that would take well over a year to start any production when we have a new design worked out and can have a prototype ready for RAF test flights in 9 months if you can get us an engine for it from Allison. They were, they could and they did a deal and were very happy with the performance of the prototype, and placed a production order.

When this news worked its way through to the Army Air Force they decided to look into the possibilities and eventually ordered a production run that wound up as the A-36 low  level fighter. The Allison V12 was the only non-radial combat aircraft engine built in the USA and, unlike the Rolls Royce Merlin engine and the German ME bf109, it did not have a supercharger which was essential for combat above 15,000 ft as well as top performance at lower altitudes. After the RAF had a few month's experience with the new plane, the  RAF did the obvious thing and grafted a Rolls Royce Merlin engine from a Spitfire onto one of their "P-51's" (don't remember what the RAF called their version of the plane).  At this time the RAF got the North American crew on board the update and they soon found out that Packard Motor Company in the US was building Rolls Royce engines for the PT Boats of the Navy. Packard was happy to add Merlin egines for NA to their production runs and the P-51 was officially launched.

One of the benefits of NA being small and nearly broke was that the design engineers had to do double duty as production engineers so they designed the plane for simple and fast as well as low cost production. At that time the conventional practice was to build the airframe and then have people crawl inside to string all the wires and cables together, and this more than doubled the assembly time and cost. NA designed the fuselage in two half shells and had the electrical, hydraulic and control cables, etc installed in each half prior to sewing the halves together. The P-51 cost about one third the cost of the P-38 and about half the cost of the P-47 or F6F Navy planes.

The video here: http://www.asb.tv/videos/view.php?v=1bf99434&br=500 

One of my grandpas used to love to visit Cuba for vacation getaways. Cigars, cocktails, lovely women, and great sport fishing. Here's an idea of what Havana was like, before the Commies destroyed it. Prosperous, clean, lively, and free. Now it's a dump.

This footage ought to be enough to persuade even the most loony Lefty, especially since even the Castro brother thugs are walking back Socialism this week...but it won't.

The Austrian Adolf Hitler spent a few years just over the border in Passau in youth before his parents moved back to Linz, but there are no signs there bragging about it. He spoke the Southern Bavarian dialect which is used in north Austria and southern Bavaria (there are apparently many German dialects).

I got onto that topic because, having recently returned from that part of the world, I was checking out the Anschluss, the 1938 "joining" of the short-lived Republic of Austria (short-lived since the Hapsburg's Austria-Hungary fell apart after WW1) with Germany. From what I have read, this event was welcomed by many Austrians - but what do I know? It was certainly not welcomed by the Jews of Vienna.

The Anschluss is part of the story of European - and American - appeasement of aggressive expansion and control. Not a shot was fired and a vote, of sorts, provided some legitimacy. Today, the EU is trying to do it, but with paper not armies.

The history of Europe, since Roman times, is one of things being pulled together, then coming apart. It will be the same with the EU. Anschluss.

I dedicate this post to our pal Sippican, who knows a lot more about archeetekcher than I do.

What does Pope Benedict have to do with Regensburg? Plenty. 

Plus the town is Germany's medieval gem (and was not bombed by the Allies). It would be a very pleasant town to live in.

The great gothic St. Peter's (c. 1240) is fine, but we found this small parish church, not a tourist site, Ulrichskirche (also 1200s I believe), which is next door to the cathedral, interesting from a detective standpoint. Take a look at the bastardised architecture and decor.

What first struck us on entering was that the church organist was practicing, noodling on his old German pipe organ with comfortable recessional noises. Great.

Second thought was "What the heck is this?"

Well, clearly somebody in the 1700's decided to gussy up the old-fashioned, gothic-ish church with Baroque. Redecorating. Squared the old columns, added squigglies to them, new baroque pulpit, and painted over the old gothic paint and stone.

More interesting architectural detail below the fold -

Don Juan's Dad was Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Austria. His Mom was Barbara Blomberg, a local singer who entertained Charles with music and fun while he passed through Regensburg in 1546.

Not much more is heard in history about Barbara, but we are grateful to her for bearing John of Austria, who led the allied navies against the Ottomans at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.

It is believed that John was conceived during a one-night-stand in this old hotel in Regensburg (yellow one on the right, a week or so ago). An historic little hook-up indeed:

One place we did not get to on our trip was Salzburg. Wish we had had time to visit that medieval city which, as its name implies, got rich selling and transporting salt down the river.

Our guide pointed out to us how important salt was at the time - not as a condiment, but as a food-preservative. "White gold."

I wonder what salt mines were like in 1400.

I have a friend who is a bit of a watch collecter and amateur expert. He showed me the Vacheron Constantin watch he was wearing the other day.

It's the oldest surviving watch company in the world. Est. 1755. They make unostentatious fine watches, or "timepieces" as watch snobs term them. You have to wind them every morning which, if I understand it right, all very fine watches require.

I am a Timex guy - a watch I wear routinely needs to take plenty of abuse and needs to be disposable - but I have a couple of somewhat fancier watches which I rarely use. Consumption is not one of my hobbies (I don't own a lot, but I have enough of everything), but I can appreciate fine hand-made things.

My friend tells me that Obama wears a flashy and expensive IWC, assembled from innards made by other companies. "Typical Obama," said he.

Photo is a Vacheron Constantin Jubilee.

Finally, somebody remembered to give me this book for my birthday.

Just need to finish reading my Baroque book first.

Does it seem to you that they keep making books with smaller and smaller print these days...?

Instead of turning up my nose at Baroque design, I decided to try to get into the heads of those who promulgated this heavily-ornamented style from around 1600 to 1750 in Europe.

Aside from some Italian kitsch, nobody has done new baroque for a long time. This remarkable book, Baroque: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, despite its abundance of photos, is not a coffee-table book. It is dense with text and scholarly detail, and 500 pages of small print which tests my eyes. There is no way I will complete this before I arrive in Vienna, but I will give it the old college try.

One idea which is coming through clearly is the notion of "the world as a stage." Baroque design is meant to be a stage set. It was meant to impress and/or intimidate and/or inspire - to convey power and wealth, but also to provide a grandiose setting for the highly formalized interactions and occasions of the high classes of the time. It does that, however fussy, overdone, and gratuitously gaudy it may look to a modern eye.

Another feature of Baroque design is that it moves. It has curves, details that jump out; interiors can be a "blooming, buzzing confusion" (the term William James used to describe his speculation about the experience of a human infant).

Versailles, St. Peter's Square (which is a circle), and the Hofberg Library are some classics of Baroque. Baroque is sensual, indulgent, extravagant, maybe grandiloquent. Like Bach. Bernini's 1650 Ecstasy of St. Theresa contains most of the elements of Baroque, especially the melding of sensual art with the grand architectural design:

Here's a short list of the main elements of Baroque design. 

Wiki explains how Baroque design has its roots in Mannerism, and how it was replaced, as a design fashion, by the aesthetic of Neoclassicism, which embraced restraint and cool "reason" as a reaction to a Baroque which had been taken to its limits.

We do not need to be enslaved to the aesthetic of our own time - or of any time. Baroque, however interesting, just isn't a Maggie's Farm, Yankee style. It's not in the blood.

Here's a Baroque era table, which I find both hideous and wonderful at the same time. It certainly moves, with those squigglies wiggling all over the inlay, and those sea slugs creeping up the legs:

As I always do before trips, I am catching up on history. This trip will be Vienna and the Danube. I view these places historically as the hinterlands, but you cannot fault their production of music in recent centuries. Music, wars, and sort-of hideous baroque architecture.

Vienna had been a Roman frontier outpost, but surely had been a barbarian settlement before that.

I do recall that European History in high school made my head spin from the endless alliances and endless wars and the reconfigurations of empires, kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and nations. With my ADD, it's a wonder I did so well with it. Forgot most of it. The War of the Spanish Succession.

I did not forget some details of the devastating Franco-Prussian War, but I certainly had forgotten that "German Austria" wanted to be part of Germany after WW1, but the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations forbade it. German Austria reached down into the (still) German-speaking areas of northern Italy. The Austria of today is a relatively brand-new nation (1945 or 1955 - pick the date) although it was a Babenburg duchy in 1156 and later was roughly the core of the Hapsburg's power for 640 years.

The Hapsburgs are credited with keeping the Ottomans out of Europe in 1683, but the King of Poland, Jan Sobieski, deserves lots of credit. There were 300 years of resisting the Ottoman Empire's invasions. I have never understood why Middle-Easterners coveted Europe, but they still do.

I find it amusing to think of what was going on in the wilds of the American colonies at the same time. Only Spain really cared, because of the gold. Otherwise insignificant except as pawns in larger European power games.

In the early 1700s, the Hapsburgs counted among their imperial control Belgium, Sardinia, Corsica, the Duchy of Milan, Naples, and Sicily. Two hundred years earlier, HRE "Emperor" Charles V in 1516 also happened to be King of Spain, bringing Spanish America, for a while, into the bounds of the Holy Roman Empire - such as it was: A crown, a flag, a bunch of castles and palaces, a title, and some truly snazzy outfits with fancy medals on them to impress the gals. Being King of Spain, on the other hand, was probably a cool gig with plenty of perks and babes.

The modern European nations are all younger in their configurations and their governmental structures than the US (except for the post-Empire island core of Britain).

One thought this perspective gave me is that the EU may be little more than an expanded reconstitution of the Holy Roman Empire - combined with the old Roman Empire. In time, it will pass too.

Photo below, Palace Schoenbrunn, first constructed as a hunting lodge in the early 1700s. "Hey, honey, have you seen where I put my camo and my ammo?"

That's from a time when royal governments lived off the labor of the people. Not like now, right?

While feasting on late after-dinner hazelnut gelati a little over a week ago in the relatively non-touristy lakefront village of Baveno, just up from the small piazza on the main drag, we were drawn to the sounds of a church choir, and sat on the stoop of the side door of the sanctuary for a half hour listening to them practice as darkness fell.

Nothing can make a 20-person choir sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir the way a small stone 900 year-old church can. Excellent group, too, with an exuberant organist.

Saint Gervaso is the patron saint of Baveno. Like many old buldings in Italy, the church was built of stone previously used in Roman buildings, some still bearing Roman markings and lettering. Recycling. We noted that they never took stones from the Roman bridges or aqueducts, though. Smart - and a conservative message.

This is no famous church, just an ordinary village church. Clearly pre-Gothic. The church and tower were built in around 1100 (but the front of the sanctuary was expanded a bit since then), the Baptistery in 1628, and the open hall of the Stations of the Cross probably in the 1700s, when Baveno became wealthy from its quarries of pink marble (which are still in use).

Palm trees right up there near the Swiss border.

 More photos of this small, unknown parish church below -