City of Peace
May. 28th, 2010 06:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakBefore I ramble about Osnabrück, writers and the like, a fannish observation: hastily checking lj-dom, I saw that James MacAvoy has been cast as young Charles Xavier for X-Men: First Class, aka the "Charles and Erik are in love and then break up" story (seriously: do the summaries the studio PR gave for this prequel so far read differently to you?). My immediate reaction to this was: I wonder what this will do to likeadeuce's fannish loyalties. As for me, I'm torn. On the one hand, that part of the backstory was the one I am most curious about, and it won't have Wolverine in it. (Nothing against Logan per se, only I like him as part of an ensemble, not as the de facto main character he became in the later X-Men movieverse outings.) Also, in lack of a time machine and a young Patrick Stewart, James MacAvoy is certainy an intriguing choice. Not much like P.S. at all but a good and charismatic actor. Now for an equally good Erik, please.
...on the other hand, well. X-Men III. And the trailer was enough to make me not see Wolverine. Plus the Charles 'n Erik break-up was covered so superbly bypenknife in Fear the Rest.
...Aaaanyway. Back to real life. Osnabrück is an old city which was bombed to smithereens in WWII but got reconstructed so well that you don't notice if you don't know. However, the part where 80% of the city was laid to waste was the reason why my paternal grandfather, whose hometown it was, decided after returning from the war that he couldn't stand the sight of rubble anymore and moved his entire family down south, which is why I was born in Bamberg. But he took me to visit Osnabrück a couple of times when I was a child, so I have a somewhat sentimental connection to this city, and when it got chosen as the location for the annual conference, I was thrilled. It's very suitable for a PEN-meeting for its two main claims to fame: a) Osnabrück was one of the two cities where the peace accord after the 30-years-war was negotiated (the Protestant one; the Catholic city was Münster, and both negotations and peace treaty signings took place in both towns), and b) it's the hometown of Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front. So in recent decades, the local city hall decided to make the most of it, gave Osnabrück the label "city of peace" and build lots of memorials with anti war quotes from writers for over 2000 years (Virgil to Remarque) everywhere. And to host conferences.
The city hall, next to St. Katherine's, and the square. You'll notice the weather changes in the pictures, which is because annoyingly, when the sun was shining there were cars a plenty in the square, and later when it was cloudier it was easier to photograph.
Cloudy version:
Look back from the city hall to the square:
St. Katherine's next to the city hall:
Inside the city hall, the most famous room is the Friedenssaal where the Westfalian peace accord was struck, after the most brutal war ever fought on European soil until the 20th century. Emissaries from all the European nations were in the room where you now have lots and lots of writers, plus the mayor:
The end of the Thirty-Years-War, in document:
Sidenote: as a case of "only in Germany..." I offer that back when Bush and Blair invaded Iraq, one of the comments by our more historically-minded journalists was that this broke the Westfalian Peace Accord. (Actually, Henry Kissinger, no stranger to war crimes, said this as well, which felt... odd.) I doubt either of them knew or cared.
Back to the photos. Lots of reconstructed timber in the city centre, which looks very pretty:
Also a cathedral:
And a river called Hase, which means "hare" in German:
Back in the central town square, where the city hall is, there is also the Erich-Maria-Remarque centre, where of course there is an ongoing exhibition about Remarque, but also always changing exhibitions about diverse subjects. The current one is about soldiers from the Third World in WWII, who apparantly outnumbered soldiers from the US and Europe by far, both in terms of participation and deaths, a belated consequence of colonialism. Here's a part of the exhibition, with the map showing where they came from:
And a column listing all the countries of origin, under the headline "Our Liberators":
Some bits from the ongoing Erich Maria Remarque exhibition. A letter from the young Remarque to Stefan Zweig, helpfully transscribed for those of us not exactly able to decypher Remarque's handwriting (btw, Zweig was, and helped):
Original cover for his most famous work:
The inscription below the title says "written by all the dead soldiers". All Quiet on the Western Front is the German WWI classic, like Wilfried Owen's poetry is what you associate with WWI in English. The story of the film version, however, is a sad comment on the crumbling Weimar Republic because when it hit the screens in 1930, three years before Hitler came to power, Goebbels' campaign against it was so effective that it was shown only in a few cinemas (interrupted by released mice and shouting Nazis) before it was forbidden. My paternal grandparents had to go to Holland across the border to watch it, which they did; Granddad was always proud that Remarque was an Osnabrücker like himself and had a first edition of the book in his shelf.
Here are some pages from the manuscript:
Off now to the conference. Just one more question: when I uploaded the photos to Photobucket, I noticed the function where you can change the link so it's not an endless number but whatever word you choose is gone. Or am I missing something? Please advise.
likeadeuce's fannish loyalties. As for me, I'm torn. On the one hand, that part of the backstory was the one I am most curious about, and it won't have Wolverine in it. (Nothing against Logan per se, only I like him as part of an ensemble, not as the de facto main character he became in the later X-Men movieverse outings.) Also, in lack of a time machine and a young Patrick Stewart, James MacAvoy is certainy an intriguing choice. Not much like P.S. at all but a good and charismatic actor. Now for an equally good Erik, please....on the other hand, well. X-Men III. And the trailer was enough to make me not see Wolverine. Plus the Charles 'n Erik break-up was covered so superbly by
penknife in Fear the Rest. ...Aaaanyway. Back to real life. Osnabrück is an old city which was bombed to smithereens in WWII but got reconstructed so well that you don't notice if you don't know. However, the part where 80% of the city was laid to waste was the reason why my paternal grandfather, whose hometown it was, decided after returning from the war that he couldn't stand the sight of rubble anymore and moved his entire family down south, which is why I was born in Bamberg. But he took me to visit Osnabrück a couple of times when I was a child, so I have a somewhat sentimental connection to this city, and when it got chosen as the location for the annual conference, I was thrilled. It's very suitable for a PEN-meeting for its two main claims to fame: a) Osnabrück was one of the two cities where the peace accord after the 30-years-war was negotiated (the Protestant one; the Catholic city was Münster, and both negotations and peace treaty signings took place in both towns), and b) it's the hometown of Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front. So in recent decades, the local city hall decided to make the most of it, gave Osnabrück the label "city of peace" and build lots of memorials with anti war quotes from writers for over 2000 years (Virgil to Remarque) everywhere. And to host conferences.
The city hall, next to St. Katherine's, and the square. You'll notice the weather changes in the pictures, which is because annoyingly, when the sun was shining there were cars a plenty in the square, and later when it was cloudier it was easier to photograph.
Cloudy version:
Look back from the city hall to the square:
St. Katherine's next to the city hall:
Inside the city hall, the most famous room is the Friedenssaal where the Westfalian peace accord was struck, after the most brutal war ever fought on European soil until the 20th century. Emissaries from all the European nations were in the room where you now have lots and lots of writers, plus the mayor:
The end of the Thirty-Years-War, in document:
Sidenote: as a case of "only in Germany..." I offer that back when Bush and Blair invaded Iraq, one of the comments by our more historically-minded journalists was that this broke the Westfalian Peace Accord. (Actually, Henry Kissinger, no stranger to war crimes, said this as well, which felt... odd.) I doubt either of them knew or cared.
Back to the photos. Lots of reconstructed timber in the city centre, which looks very pretty:
Also a cathedral:
And a river called Hase, which means "hare" in German:
Back in the central town square, where the city hall is, there is also the Erich-Maria-Remarque centre, where of course there is an ongoing exhibition about Remarque, but also always changing exhibitions about diverse subjects. The current one is about soldiers from the Third World in WWII, who apparantly outnumbered soldiers from the US and Europe by far, both in terms of participation and deaths, a belated consequence of colonialism. Here's a part of the exhibition, with the map showing where they came from:
And a column listing all the countries of origin, under the headline "Our Liberators":
Some bits from the ongoing Erich Maria Remarque exhibition. A letter from the young Remarque to Stefan Zweig, helpfully transscribed for those of us not exactly able to decypher Remarque's handwriting (btw, Zweig was, and helped):
Original cover for his most famous work:
The inscription below the title says "written by all the dead soldiers". All Quiet on the Western Front is the German WWI classic, like Wilfried Owen's poetry is what you associate with WWI in English. The story of the film version, however, is a sad comment on the crumbling Weimar Republic because when it hit the screens in 1930, three years before Hitler came to power, Goebbels' campaign against it was so effective that it was shown only in a few cinemas (interrupted by released mice and shouting Nazis) before it was forbidden. My paternal grandparents had to go to Holland across the border to watch it, which they did; Granddad was always proud that Remarque was an Osnabrücker like himself and had a first edition of the book in his shelf.
Here are some pages from the manuscript:
Off now to the conference. Just one more question: when I uploaded the photos to Photobucket, I noticed the function where you can change the link so it's not an endless number but whatever word you choose is gone. Or am I missing something? Please advise.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-28 07:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-28 04:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-28 09:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-28 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-28 05:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-28 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-28 11:30 am (UTC)James Macavoy is an interesting choice. Maybe there is something Patrick Stewart-ish about his eyes?
no subject
Date: 2010-05-28 04:50 pm (UTC)Re:Aborigines: yes; the Maoris from New Zealand are there as well. Did they at least get a pension and some acknowledgment from their states?
no subject
Date: 2010-05-29 12:17 am (UTC)A lot of Aboriginal Australians enlisted by claiming not to be Aboriginal and they were treated as regular servicemen or servicewomen, but those who enlisted as Aboriginal people were treated as badly as you might expect from a country with an official policy of "they're all going to die out, so let's hurry that along by taking their kids away." The acknowledgement has only come since the late 1980s.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-28 12:22 pm (UTC)Ah, I'd cite Siegfried Sassoon's* trilogy of novels (Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man/an Infantry Officer/Sherston's Progress) as the parallel, though I suppose Owen's better remembered now. And Henri Barbusse's Le Feu to complete the triumvirate.
I love the idea that we should mount a Westphalian defence against all proposed wars.
* Not influenced at all by the fact that he was a distant cousin!
no subject
Date: 2010-05-28 04:54 pm (UTC)Incidentally, the Thirty-Years-War produced some stunning and devastating poetry by Andreas Gryphius, but I don't think that has been translated into English. Though Grimmelshausen's novels "Simplicius Simpicissimus" or "Mother Courage" (yes, the basis for Brecht's play) might have been.