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.
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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.
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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 readingChristmas The Royal WayChristmas Trees Through HistoryWine For Christmas: The Gum Arabic Vintages
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.
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 readingNaga Queen The Principality of Monaco in World War IIAssassinate Hitler: Maurice Bavaud
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.
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 readingEvacuation From Yalta 1919Lost and Found: Britannic's Lost OrganSurviving Shipwreck Three Times
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