Wilhelm Lamszus: Oracle of Doom

In 1912, Wilhelm Lamszus published his anti-war novel The Human Slaughterhouse. It was a vision of the Armageddon of World War I still to come. The book was written for a young audience, but received general interest and much acclaim. It became an unlikely bestseller and a thorn in the side of the Kaiser.

Wilhelm Lamszus

The success of the book confirmed Wilhelm Laszus in his hope to warn humanity of impending disaster. “The Human Slaughterhouse” was published by Alfred Janssen Verlag in Berlin and Hamburg. It had an enormous echo. In a few months, the 110-page novel had been reprinted 70 times. After three months, 100,000 books had been sold. In 1913, a reduced-price "popular edition" of 20,000 copies was instantly sold out. In the same year, the book became available in an English translation with a starting edition of 10,000 copies. It was quickly published in French, Danish, Czech, Finnish and Japanese, too. The importance of the novel was recognized by publishers in all languages: The French translation was done by the eminent novelist Henri Barbusse; the Danish translation contained a foreword from Martin Andersen; and a later German edition was prefaced by an introduction by Carl von Ossietzky.

Among German Social Democrats, the popularity of the publication was extremely high. Shortly after its first release, excerpts from the book appeared in print in the party newspaper Hamburger Echo. They were also published in Stuttgart’s socialist weekly newspaper Die Neue Zeit. Editors praised the author emphatically.

As a matter of course, book and author were celebrated at the 5th German Peace Congress in Berlin as well as on the 19th International Peace Conference in Geneva. Publisher Bruno Wille said of the novel that it was a book sized pamphlet which should be distributed all over the country. The 1911 Nobel Peace Prize winner Alfred Hermann Fried was the founder of the German Peace Society. He wrote: This book should come into millions of hands. It will become one of the sacred books of mankind.

But the triumph with the intelligentsia was followed by repression by militaristic bullies. His Imperial and Royal Highness Crown Prince Wilhelm of the German Empire intervened directly with the Senate in Hamburg. He demanded that Wilhelm Lamszus be dismissed from his teaching post immediately. Hamburg only caved in partly to imperial pressure and banned the sale of the book for a short period. But to be sure, the senate set its secret police to spy on the author. The reports are still available in Hamburg archives. Secret policemen came dressed as mourners to the funeral of Wilhelm Lamszus' father in June 1914. The spooks filed all reviews and newspaper reports about The Human Slaughterhouse meticulously. With so much work, they still failed to incriminate him. With no proof of him being a public enemy, his expulsion from school and teaching post was impossible.

The reactionary press opened full fire on him Daily Mail style, lots of bombast and little truth. They denounced Wilhelm Lamszus as unpatriotic, a weakling, a nerveless coward, an anarchist, a syndicalist and a revolutionary. The escalation in the press finally kicked the Hamburg Senate into action. They feared riots and protests in the street and promoted the teacher out of the centre of the storm: Wilhelm Lamszus was commissioned to travel to North Africa. His task was completely spurious. He was to study the situation of Germans in the French Foreign Legion. The senate effectively exiled him on a state pension.

Further reading
Robert Koch: With System Against Disease
Lohengrin: Sweet History of Product Placement
Borussia: Not (Quite) Soccer History

Nicolaus Copernicus: A National Treasure

German and Polish historians have been wasting their time over an issue of nationality. Is the eminent astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus German of Polish? Whole tomes have been filled with learned dissertations proving the one or the other to the author's liking. I do have an answer to that question, and nobody will like it. 

Nicolaus Copernicus was born in 1473 in the city of Thorn or Toruń as the son of Nicolaus Koppernigk and Barbara Watzenrode; the city is situated in the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship in modern Poland. In 1473, the city was called Thorn (in German); it was a member of the Hanseatic League. Until 1466, it had been part of the independent state of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia and the Chełmno Land (Kulmerland in German).

In the 9th century, Chełmno Land was inhabited by a mixture of Baltic and Slav people that had displaced the Old Prussian inhabitants starting in the 8th century. In the 10th century, the Dukes of Masovia had started to conquer the area. By 1065, it was considered part of the Duchy of Masovia but its inhabitants remained mainly Baltic and Slav until the 13th century.

The Dukes of Masovia were among the leading aristocrats in the Lithuanian-Polish Empire and Commonwealth, They were involved in the regular wars of succession as contenders for the Polish throne. At the beginning of the 13th century, the Masovian treasury was empty and their armies were needed in Poland for another war of succession. The pagan Old Prussians exploited this situation. They entered Chełmno Land to plunder it and take its inhabitants into slavery. They conquered it, tore down the castles, burnt cities and villages (and particularly all churches), and slaughtered or abducted the inhabitants.

In 1228, Duke Conrad I of Masovia called in the Teutonic Knights and granted them Chełmno Land as a dependent Duchy within Masovia (according to Polish history books); or he called them in to conquer and to hold as an independent state (according to German history books); the original treaty is conveniently missing. For good measure, Emperor Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire and Pope Gregory IX granted them Prussia including the Chełmno Land, too, under condition that they convert the pagan Old Prussians by the sword if necessary. Frederick II declared them independent of the Holy Roman Empire, and Gregory IX gave them church autonomy as further inducements.
 
The Teutonic Knights conquered Prussia and Chełmno Land. The Old Prussians chose the sword over conversion to Christianity and were slaughtered to the last man, woman, and child; today we would call it genocide. The Teutonic Knights recruited German settlers (remember the Pied Piper of Hamelin?) and repopulated the whole province with settler hungry for land. The first two cities they founded were Chełmno (Kulm) and Toruń (Thorn) in 1233.
 
At the end of the 14th century, the Hanseatic League and the Teutonic Knights had opposing interests where commerce was concerned. The Prussian member cities of the Hanseatic League entered an alliance with the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth to further their interests. A first war was ended in the peace treaty of Thorn in 1411. A second war ended in 1466 in the second treaty of Thorn. In the latter treaty, the Teutonic Knights lost large tracts of land including Thorn to the Polish king. A new country was created and called Royal Prussia. It was not part of the Lithuanian-Polish Empire but of the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth. It was held and ruled in personal union by the King of Poland.
 
Nicolaus’ father was also called Nicolaus. The family name was spelled as Koppernigk; it is considered possible that the family name meant that they had come at some time from the Silesian village of Koperniki in the Oppole Voivodeship in modern Poland. Father Nicolaus Koppernigk had moved from Cracow to Thorn between 1454 and 1458. But citizens going by the same family name had been on record in Thorn before that. He married a patrician’s daughter, Barbara Watzenrode, and they had four children. Silesia had a history as tortuous as Toruń minus the Baltic influence and changed hands several times over between interested monarchs.

While all these places are situated in modern Poland, that doesn't make its inhabitants Polish by some retroactive act of annexation, as much as Polish historians work on that premise in their history writing. That Thorn was part of Royal Prussia and governed by the Polish crown doesn't mean anything either. That the city was a German settlement in Prussia and that Prussia later became the bully boy of Germany doesn't make him German. The question is simply completely irrelevant and doesn't interest in the least. Every penny spent on research has been a total waste.

The concept of nationality started in the 19th century after the Reorganisation of Europe following the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna. Nationality made it important for some newly emerging states like the German kingdoms that they have figures to identify with. Before that time, nationality would not have been understood by anyone. Nicolaus Copernicus was therefore neither German nor Polish, but simply a person born in Thorn.

Further reading
Bulla Aurea: The Golden Bull
Borussia: Not (Quite) Soccer History
Frederick II: A Model Ruler?

Johann Sebastian Bach: Christmas Oratorio

For over 100 years, Johann Sebastian Bach's Christmas Oratorio lay in archives. The sheets were rediscovered around 1850. Music historians were amazed and excited, then bemused and dismayed: Johann Sebastian Bach had composed important parts of the work before. At places he plagiarized earlier compositions into the oratorio. The originals, however, had had very different texts, and they hadn't been intended for Christmas recitals.

Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach was not only one of the greatest composers of all times, he was also one of the most industrious. As prolific as he was, the quality of his pieces always betrays the Master. But is a master composer like him allowed to copy and plagiarize his own work or that of someone else? May music composed for a sumptuous feast at the Royal court be recycled as a Christmas composition to be played in church? These were questions Bach researchers of the 19th century asked. The answers not to their liking.
 
The questions, however, didn’t come up until long after his death. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio had been composed as a series of six cantatas to be played on the holidays from Christmas to Epiphany in 1734/35. In that sense, the work was not intended to be performed contiguously or as a single concert. The cantatas were played at mass of the respective holy days during worship in one of the two main churches in Leipzig, St Thomas or St Nicholas.

Around 1850 and after Felix Mendelssohn and his contemporaries had brought back Johann Sebastian Bach's great Passions from oblivion, the Berlin Sing-Akademie performed the Christmas Oratorio for the first time. The work had come by way Johann Sebastian's son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach to their music library. Soon after the discovery, a Bach scholar noticed that the musical score for the triumphant opening chorus "Jauchzet, frohlocket, auf preiset die Tage" is identical to a piece set to music with a completely different text: "Tönet, ihr Pauken, erschallet, Trompeten". This text was crossed out in the original manuscript and overwritten with the new.

Johann Sebastian Bach had plagiarized his own composition which wasn’t a sacred work intended for church service. It was festive music written for Maria Josepha, Princess of Saxony and Queen of Poland. On 8 December 1733, she held a birthday celebration for which she commissioned a piece from Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach biographer Philipp Spitta found the common practice of plagiarizing during the Baroque an unpleasant surprise when writing around 1880. He took refuge in a lie and claimed that Johann Sebastian Bach could compose only spiritual works no matter what he composed. Philipp Spitta wrote: "His occasional worldly works were rather unworldly, and (...) the composer gave them back to their original home when he converted them to church music."
 
What happens during the first bars of the opening chorus of the Christmas Oratorio? True to the original text, the drums open the song and as requested, the trumpets respond. Then the violins join in and the high winds form a veritable confetti parade bringing in the whole orchestra to play; it is still the festive music intended for the Royal birthday.

Johann Sebastian Bach didn’t hold with the idea of letting his music gather dust in a collector's cabinet or to let it end on the trash heap of a noble court. Any instrumental concerto could be used all over again. A narrowly defined musical composition like a birthday cantata would be irretrievably lost. The Royal court in Dresden would not have approved of the recycling of the musical score and text. Johann Sebastian Bach therefore asked his librettist Picander to write a new text for the Nativity of Christ. He then added the new text in his own hand to the original score while crossing out the old words.

That his courtly triumphal music would become a "Concert of Angels" for posterity would not have bothered him in the least; after all, Johann Sebastian Bach had much to do. Very much indeed, considering the amount of compositions he had to churn out for the city notables of Leipzig while running the famous boys’ choir at St Thomas at the same time. And he was nothing if not practical. Add economy at work to a king's God-given right to rule, and you might see that Philipp Spitta was on to something, if for all the wrong reasons. The staging for sacred and for profane power were intimately related to legitimacy and, consequently, very similar forms were in use in all their emanations.

Prince Elector Frederick August I of Saxony (and as King of Poland and Duke of Lithuania August II) died in 1733. Among the Baroque princes in Europe in the age of absolutism, he was one of the most ostentatious. That Johann Sebastian Bach would compose for his court (and his successor’s, too), made financial sense. The concrete practical reasons behind his cantatas to pay homage to the Royal family were a necessity to insure his future. Some relatives and colleagues of Johann Sebastian Bach’s were employed at the important and art-loving court of the Saxon electors and kings of Poland in Dresden. Johann Sebastian Bach himself hoped and worked to attain the title of court composer. Should he run into problems in Leipzig, and he had quite a few run-ins with civic and church authorities there, he could then defend his position with greater authority than as the mere choir master of St Thomas Church. At a later date, he received the title of court composer to the Electoral and Royal Court at Dresden.

Further reading
Christmas The Royal Way
Christmas Trees Through History
Wine For Christmas: The Gum Arabic Vintages

The Widely Ignored Parts of Le Corbusier's Biography

Le Corbusier is hailed as a great architect. He is depicted on the Swiss 10 Franc note. At his funeral in 1965, tributes from all over the world poured into Paris. It is time to have a look at the real Le Corbusier and what he stood for.

Le Corbusier, or Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, died in 1965 in France near to Monaco. His funeral was held at the Louvre Palace in Paris and was a grand affair. Tributes were paid by the President of the United States, by the Kremlin, by Salvador Dali (one of his most ardent critics to be fair to the painter), and Japanese television transmitted the proceedings live in full length. Probably none of this would have happened if his carefully edited biography had been known in full at the time.

As a young man and artist, he had written about his Swiss home city of La Chaux-de-Fonds: “The little Jew will certainly one day be vanquished. I say ‘little Jew’, because here they command, make a nuisance of themselves and strut about, and their fathers have bought up the entirety of the local industry.”

In 1930, he acquired French citizenship. He wanted to escape Switzerland as he saw that the democratic structures of the country would be diametrically opposed to the monstrous architectural urban development he planned. He had travelled Europe, spending the Great War in Switzerland to return to Paris after everything was safe again.

When Marshall Petain proclaimed the collaborationist regime in Vichy France, he wrote to his mother: “If he (Petain) means what he proclaims, then Hitler can crown his life’s work: The reorganisation of Europe.” In the same letter he wrote about the Jews that “their blind greed for money has corrupted the country.”

At this point in his life, he tampered for the first time with his biography. When applying for a post in the Vichy administration, he forgot to mention his Swiss origins or any link to Switzerland at all. He had, over night, acquired a purely French pedigree and upbringing. He was consequently accepted into the administration and held several different and influential posts in fascist France.

After France was freed, he was immediately hired by the government. How could this have happened? Well, his biography had undergone another magical change. The Swiss element was quite prominent this time and Swiss are notoriously neutral, aren’t they? The blank of the Vichy regime years didn’t draw any particular attention, as many French opposed to Hitler had blanks to show for that self-same time.

It took 40 years for historians to fill in the blanks Le Corbusier had planted in his biography to cover up his involvement with fascism. There was no mention of his plans to rebuild Algiers, that he had built for the Kremlin, or that he had offered plans for a European city in Addis Ababa to Mussolini. But at last, looking at his soul-less and cold architecture, one is able to understand its function. His ‘modern urbanism’ was conceived as slave pens for the masses to serve their fascist masters. It’s a twist of irony that his architectural influence mostly damaged US cities.

What really makes you wonder is the fact how he came to grace the Swiss 10 Franc note. But that is a mystery the Swiss National Bank is bent on keeping a secret. Even more disturbing is the fact that at the same time Le Corbusier was intended for the 10 Franc note, Basel’s famous historian Jacob Burckhardt came under scrutiny of Swiss Parliament for his anti-Semitism, while Le Corbusier was never mentioned.

The holes in Le Corbusier’s biography are only slowly being filled in, and they open a can of worms. Most tellingly, the holes persist in many Wikipedia entries, having only been filled in the German version so far.

Further reading
Naga Queen
The Principality of Monaco in World War II
Assassinate Hitler: Maurice Bavaud

Must Read Classic: Wilhelm Lamszus

Wilhelm Lamszus was the visionary who wrote the most realistic description of World War I two years before it started. He also managed to do this without any hero clap trap and emotional arms selling. He stuck to the bloody, gory details he foresaw so correctly. It's no wonder Hollywood never wanted to do the movie.

In “The Human Slaughterhouse,” Wilhelm Lamszus told the fate of a young family man and father enthusiastically marching to the fields of promised glory. The war would be waged against Germany’s hereditary enemy France. With uplifting and stirring martial music, he and his comrades are sent off to fight for king and country, or more correctly Emperor and German Empire. Prior to the cattle like transport to the front, the soldiers attend mass. It is held solely to consecrate their weapons of slaughter in church. In the name of God the Merciful, "He blessed our guns, that their expensive balls may make it count, that they may not get lost blown into empty air, that every precious cartridge may hit a hundred people and tear them to pieces all at once."

The protagonist of the novel is left nameless by Wilhelm Lamszus. Another prophetic twist, as we all know the graves of unknown soldiers just too well. At the front, he arrives after long marches through blood and iron and for the first time is confronted with death: "A cold fist touched us on scared hearts."

This darkly poetic style doesn't last much further into the novel. Modern war knows no poetry, only destruction. "We timidly peep out over the mounds. Has red hell opened? It screams and shrills and brings forth wild and boundless yells so unnatural that we huddle closer to each other ... and trembling, we see our faces and our uniforms were red with wet spots, and clearly visible we had meat pieces on our stuff," The soldier discovered "something white" on the dark sand: "a nameless torn off hand ... and there ... and there ... pieces of meat still attached to bits of uniform - and we recognize it, and horror descends on us: Out there are arms, legs, heads, torsos ... they howl into the night, the whole regiment is there torn to pieces, a lump of human flesh that cries to heaven ..." In the end, the protagonist also dies and is dumped into a mass grave. Nameless.

Wilhelm Lamszus uses language that points forward in its insistence to the great adventure novels of the post World War I period: to Henri Barbusse’s “Fire”, to Arnold Zweig’s “Case of Sergeant Grisha” and Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” as well as to Gabriel Chevallier’s “Fear”. Despite it all, in Wilhelm Lamszus' novel there is still hope left that it would be possible to avert the great disaster and to prevent the war.

For anyone thinking that war is something heroic, this book is a must read. And it should be on every school curriculum all over the world. The harmless little weapons of the World War I have long since been put to the museum and have been replaced by really destructive weaponry. In that sense, the book only heightens in horror if you look at it in its historical connotation.

Further reading
Evacuation From Yalta 1919
Lost and Found: Britannic's Lost Organ
Surviving Shipwreck Three Times

Prime Minister Well Cooked

Johan de Witt was Grand Pensionary of Holland, an office with powers similar to that of a Prime Minister cum Foreign Secretary all rolled into one. He led the country during the first stadtholder-less time from 1650 to 1672 when Republicans saw their chance to get more power for themselves and their families at the expense of the hereditary House of Orange.

Johan was born in 1625 in Dordrecht into the influential de Witt family. When Dordrecht was the centre of things, the family had been very powerful in Holland. But their influence had waned together with the city's, and by this time power lay with the de Graeff family in Amsterdam. Johan de Witt was able to overcome this minor obstacle by actively pursuing marriage into the de Graeff clan.
 In 1650, he became the leading deputy for Dordrecht in the States of Holland. It carried him into the right place at the right time when the young stadtholder William II of Orange suddenly died that same year. In 1653, the combined power of the Dordrecht families and the de Graeff clan made him Grand Pensionary of Holland. By dint of power distribution between the provinces, this made him in fact Prime Minister of the United Provinces of the Netherlands of which Holland was by far the most powerful.

In this position, he was pursuing a peace treaty with England (Treaty of Westminster of 1654). It included the proviso that the provinces would not allow William III of Orange to become stadtholder. This addendum was instigated by Oliver Cromwell who wanted to have the toddler son of William II as a grandson of Charles I kept out of any power for fear of a counter coup. To consolidate his own power, Johan de Witt did everything anyhow to keep all members of the House of Orange out of public offices.

He was also leading the negotiations of a peace treaty with England in 1667 (Treaty of Breda) with favorable terms for the provinces. His term in office was greatly helped by economic growth through increased trade from the colonies. With money flowing into the provinces and military and naval successes at his back, he made his final move in 1667 to oust the House of Orange permanently from power by abolishing the office of stadtholder.

The whole intrigue fell apart on him in 1672 in what would become known as the rampjaar (year of disaster). First England and then France declared war on the Netherlands. As if this wasn't enough, the bishops of Munster and Cologne invaded the Netherlands from the east. With the country virtually locked in, the frightened population turned to William III of Orange to get them out of trouble. Johan de Witt had to resign and William was appointed stadtholder, the one thing de Witt and the Republicans had tried to prevent.

Following the change in power, Johan’s older brother Cornelis de Witt was apprehended and imprisoned on charge of planning to assassinate William III. A fake letter called Johan to the prison in The Hague where Cornelis was being held. After he had entered the building, the prison guards miraculously disappeared and an angry mob of citizens entered instead.

The brothers were dragged from the prison and quite literally dismembered. The hearts of both of them were on display in a jeweller's shop for years; and it seems that parts of them were eaten by the mob. The recipe on how to properly serve Prime Minister for dinner has not survived, though, probably because all politicians leave a bad taste in your mouth and are definitely toxic.

Further reading
How to Dress Your Concubine For Dinner
How Many Monarchies Exist in Europe?
The Elect Circle of Elected Monarchs in Europe

Victoria Beckham and Her Circus Horse

Victoria Beckham owns at least one circus horse. Didn't you know that? I have incontrovertible proof of it. The pictures were taken in England. And once you look at them and consider the implications, it must be quite obvious to you, too.

Victoria Beckham

Victoria Beckham owns Victoria's Secret, and her costume designs are different. We know that, They also make a statement. The latest models on sale prove she owns a circus horse. If you don't believe me, just look at the pictures I took. Stuff as ugly and tasteless is usually worn by the girls riding horseback around a circus manege. It doesn't have to look good as it only has to be colourful, loud, and must be seen at a distance. This exactly describes what I have pictured for you.

If you see any of these costumes from near  they just give you a headache. Victoria Beckham hasn't made a name for good taste, she made a name as an average singer and by bagging one of the best football (soccer) players in the world. If you want to get a headache, too, visit the shop. Victoria's Secret can be found in New Bond Street in London.

The question where she will keep her circus horse when they move to London has not been answered so far. But that is not the only puzzle attache to her name. Why she is giving a Thanksgiving Dinner in London is an even more obscure question no one can answer. No one wants to do Thanksgiving; it is an American curiosity of no import here. Someone figure.

It gets even more puzzling why anyone wants to slaughter turkeys for that reason. And under these circumstances, when the USA is in a turkey crisis of identity threatening proportions, it makes even less sense. It is rumored that a law is going into congress soon that will limit the buying of turkey to Americans descended from the first settlers. Proof of descent has to be done by DNA. The Tea Party violently opposes the law as they have no true Americans in among them.

Meanwhile, we all are waiting for a picture of Victoria Beckham on her circus horse sporting one of her unmentionable contraptions.

Further reading
Gay Soccer Players
Austrian Mystery With Horses
Brighton Crafts Fair

Catholic London: It's Anecdotal

When a catholic priest tells anecdotes about well known and less well known people levitating around the power center of Britain, don't expect earth shaking revelations. Have some fun laughing about people you don't like anyhow and get some insights into some people you shouldn't like, but did so far. Sinners And Saints by Father Michael Seed was published by Metro Publishing. 

Mother Teresa

Father Michael Seeds is one of many catholic priests who have spent too much time with the high and mighty and too little with the poor and needy; ask Pope Francis. It is therefore hardly surprising that his collection of little stories involves a spate of names dropping. The book packed with amusing anecdotes involving power brokers in the united Kingdom. He makes it quite obvious: Power corrupts.
 
He shows up the sheer lunacy of religious people when relating to the dying days of Cardinal Hume. When announcing his coming death due to terminal cancer, Basil Hume received the answer: ‘Congratulations! That’s brilliant news. I wish I was coming with you.’ This came from the Abbot of Ampleforth. But as ecumenical advisor to the cardinals at Westminster, lunacy is the least of Michael Seeds' problems. Eccentrics, hobgoblins, and sleazes abound in his narrative.
 
There was someone called Ann Widdecombe, While still into politics (and before her reincarnation as a comic) she pulled a major publicity stunt with her conversion to Catholicism. She hid paparazzi in the crypt. She even managed to top that feat later on. Organizing an exorcism at the Home Office, she hoped to rid the rooms of the evil aura of Michael Howard who had ‘something of the night’ about him, after he left office.
 
Tony Blair was more circumspect with his sneaky conversion to Catholicism. He demanded that Michael Seeds enter through one of the ground floor windows at No 10 Downing Street to read mass to the Blair family in corpore. Alan Clark treated him as his servant priest. After once telling him that having talked to God he now felt completely at ease, he continued by showing him his collection of Nazi memorabilia.
 
Mother Teresa of Calcutta used to descend on London and demand a 30 room mansion for herself and her entourage; and would get it. Cardinal Hume said: ‘She always wants things and I always give them to her.’ Basil Hume himself is described by Michael Seeds as childish, petulant and immature while throwing tantrums when missing a football match due to his duties. And driving past No 10 Downing Street he would shout ‘Maggie out!’ But Cardinal Hume was known to never give anybody any lifts in his personal car (paid for by the faithful): ‘My car is not a taxi.’ So, how does Seeds know this?
 
There are numerous funny stories in between some plain names dropping, so the book is quite a good and amusing read. All of it obviously has to be taken with a pinch of salt, to put it mildly. Or as my grand-mother used to say: ‘Si non è vero, è ben trovato.’ (If it is not the truth, at least it’s well invented.)

Further reading
History Distortion With Criminal Intent
Eccentric Aristocrats' Stories
Roger Moore Biography

Another Public Humiliation For Carl Hirschmann

Millionaire Carl Hirschmann, heir and grandson to Jet Aviation founder Carl Hirschmann Senior, took another rap from the Swiss High Court in Lausanne. It wasn't all bad news, though, in this particular case involving his former girlfriend. The publicity attached to the sentence is probably the worst punishment.

Carl Hirschmann was the owner of the now closed VIP club Saint Germain on Zurich's prestigious Bahnhofstrasse; he has an estimated fortune of over £100 million. He was sentenced to publish an apology to his former girlfriend on the internet for calling her a liar on various websites. The Swiss High Court felled the sentence on principle while referring the details back to the district court in Meilen, canton Zurich.

With this final sentence, another lackluster episode in the life of Carl Hirschmann comes to an end and once again it needed a trial in front of the Swiss High Court. Four years ago, a former girlfriend testified to the police that he had grossly abused her. Carl Hirschmann subsequently published his allegations of a "revenge of a disappointed ex-lover" calling her a liar at the same time. His verbal attacks were made to people; he also published a written version on various websites.

The former girlfriend lodged a complaint against Carl Hirschmann as she saw herself injured in her personal rights. While the district court agreed with her and decreed that Hirschmann must apologize on the internet to her, the cantonal supreme court came to a different conclusion. The supreme judges surmised that media reporting over the processes had made a separate apology redundant. The plaintiff didn't accept this verdict and took the case to the Swiss High Court in Lausanne. The panel of high judges followed her argument: Carl Hirschmann has to publish a full apology in social media. Media coverage of the connected trials was not sufficient and doesn't count as an apology.

In another point, the judges followed Carl Hirschmann's lawyers' argument: The Swiss High Court came to the conclusion that the risk of a repetition of the incident wasn't to be expected in this case. Therefore, the judges desisted from including an in injunction in the sentence.

The district court in Meilen is now called on to clarify where exactly Carl Hirschmann has to publish the apology. While a personal website of Carl Hirschman's is still active, two Facebook profiles on which the slurs had also been published were meanwhile deleted.
 
Carl Hirschmann was sentenced to publish the following text in full:
"Carl Hirschmann and the Saint Germain Ent. AG have injured the personal rights of Lulu M. with the publication of the posts 'photographic proof exonerates Carl Hirschmann' and 'photographic evidence exposes Lulu M. as a liar' and use of the image of Lulu M. was illegal. Carl Hirschmann has explained in a letter to Lulu M. that he was sorry to have hurt her personal rights. He has apologized in the letter to her."

Further reading
When a Sassy Headline Becomes an Embarrassment
The Hirschmann Family Saga
Carl Hirschmann Appeals Against Prison Sentence

Anna Goeldi, Last Witch

Anna Göldi was one of the last victims of the superstitious belief in witches in Europe. The legal proceedings took place in Glarus, Switzerland, a Republic that had been very reticent on holding such trials through the entire witch craze. Historians had been puzzled why a witch trial should have been held as late as 1782 there, until they discovered proof that there had been two trials going on at the same time.

Anna Göldi was born in 1734 in Sennwald, a small village that at that time was subject to the Republic of Zurich. Subject meant that the village or region was governed and taxed by Zurich. Its inhabitants on the other hand had no legal rights under the laws of the republic they were subject to. They were nothing but serfs by another name. Though not a serf herself, she was born into a poor family. She took up the only career option open to her and became a servant in the household of a wealthy family.

Being obviously a good worker, she moved from family to family to serve several of the ruling families of the Republic of Glarus. As in all good republics, democracy was only a nominal affair (American readers know how that works), and all the posts in the government, the parliament, the law courts, and the church were doled out between a few families, the same person often serving in several capacities. Anna’s last employment was with the Tschudi family whose head was a judge and sat in parliament.

While she was serving there, the child of the Tschudi family fell sick, and Anna was accused of poisoning her. To be exact, she was accused of having committed acts to make the child grow needles in its stomach and vomiting them. She was subsequently charged with and condemned as a poisoner and executed by the sword, after she had admitted under torture to have been incited by the devil. Glarus held a rigid censorship over the press at the time, and therefore neither the outcome of the proceedings (today called an injunction) nor the proceeding itself nor the injunction on the proceeding (today called superinjunction) should have become public. (British readers know how censorship works today.)

All the same, the German press got wind of it and attacked the Glarus authorities with vigour over what they called a witch process. The sham process was rightly ridiculed. The sickness of the child had been diagnosed by a veterinary surgeon, and his description of symptoms and sickness met with incredulity, not only with the press, but even with the called and paid for ‘witnesses’ of the prosecution. It was this process that led to the coining of the German word Justizmord (judicial murder).

It took until 2007 to uncover that there had been a second process going on at the same time. The process was held not in the law courts of the Republic of Glarus, but in the ecclesiastical law courts of the Reformed Church of Glarus. It was the law suit of Anna Göldi against her employer for sexual harassment and rape. The process ended in a complete clearing for the employer by his brother, oops, the ecclesiastical judge, and church justice was free to operate once again to protect the poor, the weak, and the underprivileged.

Anna Göldi has meanwhile been rehabilitated by an act of parliament. As her belongings had been confiscated at the time of the process, the worth in modern terms of these belongings was established in a guesstimate and the money has been placed into a charity in her name by the Glarus government. The newly formed charity promotes human rights with special regards to women rights.

What I find most interesting in the whole thing is the fact that we quite easily and summarily call the press restrictions placed by the Glarus government of the time censorship, while the exact same mechanism today is loftily called a legal injunction or superinjunction. Is it really all just in the name, or are we systematically deprived of our rights by these so called law courts that approve these injunctions? And I haven't even started on all the secret trials that work very much like the church trial above. And then we get an idiot PM David Cameron who attacks the Guardian over defending us against leeches like him.

Further reading
The Knights Templar in Switzerland
The Queen Astrid Chapel
Zurich is More Than Banks

Monica Seles on Yo-Yo Diets

JR Books published Getting A Grip by Monica Seles. The autobiography gives an insight into women’s tennis, dieting, and binge eating. Monica tells the story of fame, her very own nightmare and the demons hounding her.

Monica Seles

In 1993, Monica Seles was on top of the tennis world. At 19 she was the number one in women’s tennis with eight Grand Slams to her name and looked like going on a record breaking career to equal Martina Navratilova or even to surpass her. Then the unimaginable happened when a demented German attacked her and stabbed her in her shoulder. While the attacker got away with a probationary sentence, Monica was sentenced to a life of fear, nightmares and depression.

Instead of a famous career entitling her to multimillion dollar sponsor deals playing tennis, she entered a period of coming to terms with what had happened and miserably failed, joining a multitude of other crime victims mostly unnamed and unknown in misery and depression. At the same time, her father and coach was diagnosed with cancer which proved to be terminal.

Trying to get back into the game during the nineties, she was constantly hampered by panic attacks, nightmares and a weight gain of 20 kilograms. She never got back into top form and numerous stress injuries bore prove of her weight struggle. As the link between her injuries and her weight was obvious, she became progressively obsessed with getting her weight down to her former sporting weight of 57 kilograms. Buying just about every book on dieting she could get her hands on, she became convinced that regaining her former weight was the key to success.

This set-up would make a perfect misery memoir so far. But Monica shows a sense of humour throughout and self-deprecatingly sees the funny side of many of the situations.

Obviously, the more she tried to diet, the more time she spent before the fridge stuffing her face. She hired a food coach whose duties included emptying the mini-bars in the hotels she was staying in and instructing the staff to not deliver any orders she might place with room service. When not in a hotel, he slept next to the kitchen to stop her midnight excursions to the fridge and the larder. This didn’t stop her from hopping round the corner to the next convenience store and getting just anything sweet she could get her hands on.

She also tells the story behind the scene of women tennis, the frostiness in the locker room and the strange atmosphere at the tennis events around the world. Quite opposed to men’s tennis where the top seeds are able to be not only respectful to each other, but might even be friends of the court, women tennis players seem to feel a need to keep other top seeds at a distance.

These days, Monica Seles is her confident self again, after realising that dieting was not solving her problems, but getting to grips with her past, her demons, and her grief for her father.

The book is very readable for everybody interested in tennis and personal achievement. Obviously, believers in Weight Watchers and other money generating scams will be highly disapproving, but for me it just showed again that eating and drinking don’t make you fat.

Further reading
The Body Image of Man
Giving Up: Key to Success
Jerzy Janowicz and Andy Murray

Roger Federer Has Created a Monster

Roger Federer will end the season with an ATP world ranking position of 6. He hasn't been ranked so low since 2002 when he ended the year on the same ranking. Has the career of Roger Federer ended because of that? Ask the guys ranked in above the 100 mark what they would think of being ranked in the top 10. So what can we expect for Roger Federer in 2014?

The ATP ranking never lies, even if tennis commentators usually pretend it does when talking their countrymen's ranking up and others' down. Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray were much more successful this year than Roger Federer, David Ferrer was more constant, and Juan Martin Del Potro won 4 tournaments to Roger Federer's 3. This inevitably means a ranking at 6, as it did in 2002. 2013 has a bottom line for him: disappointing. That goes for everyone who has watched his career. He did not achieve the goals he set for himself on one side, and he certainly didn't perform on a level of previous years.

Flashback: Shanghai in November 2002. A 21-year-old has a fantastic first Masters participation throughout the group games. In the semifinal, he fails to get through in an impressive fight against the reigning number 1, Lleyton Hewitt. The tennis world was delighted and celebrated the skills of the newcomer; Switzerland was over the moon and hoped for more magic tennis to come.

The sequel to the story is well known. The sequel is also the problem when we try to judge Roger Federer's performance these days. The Swiss master collected titles like other people collect stamps. He did it with such ease that many were shocked when he lost a set at times. Roger Federer was so superior to the competition at times that he said. "I've created a monster."

He was right. The monstrous success of his best years (from 2004 to 2007, he won 11 of 16 Grand Slams and 3 of 4 Masters) are the bar everyone and most himself have to contend with. He pushed the bar up so high that failure was the inevitable result of it. But because he managed to keep near to these high marks to the end of 2012, the year 2013 appears to us as a veritable catastrophe. Commentators are quick in ending his career again due to that. Many nations would take him or Stanislas Wawrinka thankfully as their number one players.

The facts for 2013: 1 tournament won at the lowest ATP level (Halle, Germany), 1 Grand Slam semi-final (Melbourne), 2 ATP finals (Rome, Basel) and the semi-finals at the Masters; these are the best results in 2013. On the negative side, he had back problems, defeats against low ranked players, and a failed racket test in the middle of the season. Roger Federer himself emphasized in a recent interview that back pain was the root of the problems, all the rest was just a result of it.

In fact, his performance since the disappearance of the health symptoms are up again. This trend is expected - if all goes to plan for Roger Federer - to continue in 2014. He wants more than just to compete with the best, he wants to beat them, too. He has reset the bar, which is still pretty high by any standard, against which he can be measured and should be measured, too. The old bar he set between 2004 and 2007 should be banned from use and only be applied when discussions about "greatest ever tennis player" are coming up again. 

Further reading
Giving Up: The Key to Success
Jerzy Janowicz and Andy Murray
Tennis: Mr Darcis Says Nada

Wilhelm Lamszus: Human Slaughterhouse

Wilhelm Lamszus wrote a disturbing prophecy with his bestseller "The Human Slaughterhouse – Pictures of the Coming War". In 1912, the German teacher anticipated the horrors of World War I in his novel.

In 1908, the German philosopher Rudolf Eucken won the Nobel Prize for Literature; in 1910, the German novelist Paul Heyse followed him in this honor; in 1912, the playwright Gerhart Hauptmann was another German following both of them. But none of them, nor any other known German poet, writer, author or scholar, wrote of or against the threat of an impending world war. The government and the arms industry it belonged to saw to it that there was no fame to be gained in telling the truth. Parallels to today are not completely impossible.

At the turn of the last century, a lot of generally pacifist writings were publishes, such as Bertha von Suttner's famous novel “Lay Down Your Arms!” published in 1889 or “The History of War and the Future of Peace” by French physician Charles Richet published in 1907. They were in a minority and published in the sense you would publish the latest interpretation of Nostradamus: as curiosities which also sold a few books. But for the exponents of exalted modern literature, war was not an issue except to idolize and adulate it much like today’s print media and games console producers do. And so it was left to an elementary school teacher from Hamburg to utter the great warning. His novel, you may call it his prophecy, “The Human Slaughterhouse - Pictures of the Coming War” was published in the summer of 1912. It triggered a scandal, or rather a series of scandals.

Wilhelm Lamszus’ slender work had been intended for a young adult readership, but it still amazes by its eloquence and visionary description of the world war horrors that would unfold two years later. His vision is more realistic than any of the hero mongering movies produced by government agencies for lots of money under the guise of a free market.

Wilhelm Lamszus was born in Altona in 1881. He grew up there as a single child of a shoemaker. He discovered early that he was passionate for education. In 1902, he joined the public school service of Hamburg as a teacher. He became part of a group of teaching rebels that went against an education system they perceived and recognized as completely rusted and inhumane; a system that was nothing more than the breeding ground and recruiting station for the army. At that time, he wrote educational pamphlets exposing the shortcomings of the system. Their style, polemic force and emphasis carried them far beyond contemporary literature.

Wilhelm Lamszus had the idea for “The Human Slaughterhouse” while on a military reserve training course. "What a marvel of technology people had invented and constructed," he wrote later about the beginnings of his famous book. "The war machine had become ingenious, had developed into an art form. Someone was allowed to let a machine gun purr and it squirted bullets denser than rain falls! As if death had thrown its scythe on the scrap heap and had become a mechanic instead!"

Further reading
Evacuation From Yalta 1919
Lost and Found: Britannic's Lost Organ
Surviving Shipwreck Three Times

President Thomas Jefferson Was a Slave Owner

Who said: "We believe that all men are created equal"? I suppose it all comes down to what definition you apply to "men." One of the first presidents of the United States was a well-known slave owner. Meanwhile, we have the first Afro-American President in the White House. Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses Of Monticello: An American Family was published by Norton as it a timely reminder of a second family of a historic president.

Thomas Jefferson

American President Thomas Jefferson is the lynchpin in this story shedding light on his two families, a white one and a slave one. Firstly, there was his wife, Martha Wayles Skelton who was the daughter of a fellow slave owner in Virginia. Her dowry consisted of slaves, of which at least one was a half sister: Sarah ‘Sally’ Hemings. It makes you wonder how it felt owning and selling your own children as slaves.
 
Sarah Hemings was nine when Martha Wayles Skelton died. Later, she became the mistress of Thomas Jefferson. She accompanied Thomas Jefferson to Paris when he was posted there as US ambassador to France. The French looked at these affairs differently and would not object, and the fellow slave owners in Virginia might think it normal, if a bit eccentric, to take your slave mistress on an assignment of such importance. 

American political circles frowned on such antics as inappropriate. Abigail Adams was the wife of John Adams who would precede Thomas Jefferson in the White House. Writing from London where John Adams was ambassador to the court of King George of the United Kingdom, she admonished him not to commit such an outrage. Keeping slaves was quite in order, but having an affair was completely unthinkable.
 
When Jefferson was called back to the United States, Sarah Hemings felt disinclined to follow him there. Slavery was outlawed in France;  legally, she wasn't a slave but a free woman as long as she didn't return to the United States; the same principle would apply to all her children. She was pregnant with his child when the recall came. Being promised that her children would be freed at the age of 21 made her agree to go back with him to the country of the free.
 
Thomas Jefferson didn’t take great care to conceal their relationship when they returned to the United States. Their relationship produced four children and endured unto his death. It also laid him open to political attacks and other base and abusive vituperation. The high point in abuse would be reached during his Presidency when rabid racists constantly attacked him and his policies over it.
 
Eventually, he freed their children as promised, two of them by deed of will. Sarah was not freed in his will. She was also not sold in the estate auction when the other ‘130 valuable negroes’ mentioned in the auction catalog were sold off. It seems that she was given ‘free time’; this would have spared her from having to leave Virginia. As a freed slave, she would have been bound to leave the state within a year of being freed.
 
Annette Gordon-Reed’s book covers the whole of Thomas Jefferson’s adult life. It contains a lot of historical information without being boring at any point. It also makes you wonder about the thought processes of the men who founded the United States.

Further reading
Abolition of Slavery: A Purely Financial Decision
The White Sex Slaves of 1874
Sex Workers of Georgian London

When Jean-Paul Sartre Refused The Nobel Prize For Literature

22 October 1964, everyone was waiting for the announcement of who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Finally, it was already afternoon, the news-tickers started working: Jean-Paul Sartre had been chosen to be honoured in Stockholm. A short time later, the news-tickers were busily writing again: Jean-Paul Sartre rejected the Nobel Prize for Literature. The literary world was left either speechlessly astounded or vociferously outraged.

Jean-Paul Sartre

It was around 1 pm on this 22 October 1964, when the news originating with the Swedish Academy came across the ticker that this year's Nobel Prize for Literature had been accorded to Jean-Paul Sartre, the author, playwright and founder of existentialism. The justification read that Jean-Paul Sartre's anarchistic spirit and his search for truth had exerted a far-reaching influence on modern literature.
 
Shortly afterwards came the next message which hit like a bombshell: Jean-Paul Sartre refused the Nobel Prize for Literature. The literary world went berserk. Journalists fanned out over Paris in the hope of finding someone or calling anyone who might know something. No one knew or even pretended they knew the background to the news. Journalists finally found Sartre and his life partner Simone de Beauvoir sitting in a restaurant and tried to get an interview. They were rebuffed with a statement that he had done it for personal and practical reasons and that he would issue a written statement with the full explanation the following day.

A day later, the newspapers were full of conjecture about Jean-Paul Sartre's reasons for the refusal. Swedish media were of the opinion that the Nobel Prize Committee had never been insulted more. The  refusal of the prize was unprecedented. George Bernard Shaw had not wanted the prize in 1925, but instead opted to donate the prize money to a literary society. Boris Pasternak had also rejected it in 1958 with a lot of help from his 'friends' in the KGB; Vladimir Putin knows how that one works very well.

Jean-Paul Sartre's rejection was unique: It was done voluntarily and based on his own conviction. He stated: A writer taking a political or literary stance should do so only with the means at his disposition - the written word. Any accolade received would put readers under pressure, which he consider undesirable. Writings would not read same if he were to sign "Jean-Paul Sartre" or "Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner". Furthermore, he didn't consider himself part of either political pole East or West and considered to be home in the free democratic order and socialism. By being awarded the prize, he felt he was being annexed by the West.

The journalists kept on drilling. Two days after the announcement, a team of journalists got lucky again. Again they caught Jean-Paul Sartre in a restaurant. They were kept waiting until the master was ready for them; when he was, they weren't. Neither camera nor sound was ready; the result was footage with too dark images and crackling sound. The catastrophe had high documentary value while he once again steadfastly refused to say something unambiguous. That was the problem of it all: How should he explain not taking sides without taking sides? He was sitting between two chairs; and that is the story the archive sequence tells us today.

The master seemed to refuse the media; at least that was the way it was interpreted. His motives for refusing the prize were difficult to convey. He did not want to be appropriated by any ideology. He was happiest in the no man's land between the political camps. And he didn't want the label "Nobel Prize" stuck unto his words to give them only seemingly more weight.

Jean-Paul Sartre was seemingly unfriendly, stubborn, and difficult to understand; or so it was received by journalists dealing with this particular story. But he was also open-minded, winning, and charming on other occasions.

On a visit to Geneva, he was accompanied by a team of journalists and cameramen from the Swiss newsreel company. As he tramped through the historic city together with Simone de Beauvoir, he showed a completely different side of his personality. It must have been a successful encounter between Jean-Paul Sartre and the media. Looking at the footage, he decided to write the voice-over comments himself. And not only that, he then did the voice-over himself. Jean-Paul Sartre in German acting as a speaker in the background. Unique. Unpredictable. Typical for him.

Further reading
High Literature: Being Politically Incorrect
United Nations World Capital Geneva
The Little Prince