Return of the Vann Seminar

Emory University’s Vann Seminar in Pre-Modern European History is starting up again this week for the fall. I’ve attended several past seminars and have always found stimulating conversations in a relaxed atmosphere. (Possibly the Emory students in attendance feel less relaxed than outsiders like me.)

Each seminar is devoted to a draft paper by a guest historian who also occupies the hot seat (or at least the warmest seat) during the roughly two-hour seminar. The focus is on Europe before ca. 1789, but topics have ranged around the sixteenth-century Atlantic as well. This Friday’s seminar, for instance, will discuss a paper by James Van Horn Melton on German migration to the British Americas. The German Studies department is co-hosting this one.

Joining the seminar is not difficult, but you must read the paper in advance. To receive a copy by email, google Emory Vann seminar — or go here — and use the contact information.

The standing policy seems to be to send a copy of the seminar paper to anyone who requests it. Of course, further distribution or citing of the papers is prohibited without the author’s written permission.*

I’ll omit the time and place of the seminar, to guard against someone showing up unprepared. But if you call yourself a historian, can find Aquitaine or Pomerania on a map, and are within range of Atlanta, you should probably be on the Vann Seminar mailing list.

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* Note to term paper millers: I can see the wheels turning in your head, but be forewarned: These papers are nothing like the stuff you peddle to desperate students. Pirating them is bound to lead to awkward questions from even the doziest instructors, plus potential legal trouble for you. Stick to what you know. ↩

Moonlighting on Wikipedia

This week I’ve been clearing out the cobwebs by taking a break to write a Wikipedia article or three. Since Saturday I’ve added these obscure items to The Free Encyclopedia Anyone Can Edit:

1. Georg Schäfer, a German capitalist, erstwhile Nazi official, and art collector. He needed to be distinguished from the globe-trotting, tale-spinning, acid-dropping painter Georg Schafer, who left the little dots off the A.*
2. Museum Georg Schäfer, the most acclaimed art museum in the less-than-euphoniously-named city of Schweinfurt.
3. Gesellschaft für das Gute und Gemeinnützige, a venerable do-gooder organization from my favorite Swiss city, Basel.

All three are loose translations of the German Wikipedia articles. I stumbled onto the Schafer/Schäfer ambiguity while translating the Wikipedia Commons info on the genre painting “The Bookworm.” Schäfer collected it, but a reader depending on English Wikipedia might have assumed that it was acquired by the painter Schafer, also known as “Oma Ziegenfuss.”

By the way, I’ve enjoyed seeing some of my contributions to the English Wikipedia get translated into German — for example, Poarch Creek Indian Reservation, which was deutsched into Poarch-Creek-Reservat.

Of course, starting a new Wikipedia article, while it can be gratifying, does not entitle one to any kind of ownership, or even to assurance that the piece won’t be deleted tomorrow.

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* The latter Schafer’s brief Wikipedia biography appears to be mostly fiction, contributed by his widow (who probably believes every word). Note that it has been flagged as unreliable by at least one other editor. ↩

Hypertext history: Presenting documents on the Web

A new German website uses hypertext and Web technology to present an archive of first-hand accounts of the Thirty Years’ War in central Germany. If you’re interested in the future of digital archives, the site is worth a look, even if you don’t read German. It’s called MDSZ, short for Mitteldeutsche Selbstzeugnisse der Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges.

One thing to notice is the behavior of the image on the front page, of an armored knight attacking fleeing peasants. If you mouse over the image, it is instantly magnified to show its detail in (presumably) actual size. Moving the mouse navigates intuitively to different parts of the picture (unlike some cumbersome image viewers on the Web, which move only in slightly overlapping blocks, or respond in unexpected ways to the mouse).

At MDSZ, mousing over an image (left) automatically zooms in on details (right). Moving the mouse glides smoothly around the enlarged image. (Example is reduced from actual size.)

The archive contains four Selbstzeugnisse (“ego-documents”), first-hand accounts of violence and war-related events in Thuringia. None of these has been published before. The four manuscripts are (respectively) by Volkmar Happe, Michael Heubel, Hans Krafft, and Caspar Heinrich Marx, and all four are constantly available through links in the upper right-hand corner of every page.

Das Base Ball (circa 1894)

I happened on this German definition of baseball in an early Brockhaus encyclopedia. Here’s a translation:

Base Ball (Eng., pronounced behs’ bahl), English and American national game, that for the most part resembles the German Ballspiel (which see). It is played with a hard, leather-covered ball and a wooden bat by two parties (clubs) of nine persons each. In the United States there exist two national societies for this game, which hold annual assemblies, at which game rules are set in order and controversies are settled.

The description seems rather obtuse, even for the era. Calling the game “English and American” is particularly odd. I didn’t look up the entry for Ballspiel, but have never encountered anything to indicate grounds for comparison of baseball with a German game. Was the writer a little too eager to imply a German provenance? My modern Duden has nothing to say about Ballspiel except Spiel mit einem Ball, which is generic enough to include football, basketball; you name it.

As I read this, I sensed a chasm of mutual incomprehension between the English-speaking world and the pushy young German Empire, only 23 years old at the time — this in spite of the number of immigrants still speaking and reading German in the U.S. I’m sure this is too much to extrapolate from one little passage from the Brockhaus.

Anyway, it seemed worth sharing, at least as a note on the history of baseball.

The synergy of ad men and Nazis

An oil company is in trouble for touting coffee drinks with a slogan that once adorned the gates of a concentration camp (according to the Telegraph).

“Jedem den Seinen!” shouted the Esso ads; it translates roughly as “To each their own!” Change the phrase’s plural number to singular, and you have the words on the gate of Buchenwald concentration camp: Jedem das Seine. In that context, the sense of the phrase was more like, “Each shall get what he deserves.” Like the notorious Arbeit macht frei, it is a cynically vague, but historically and emotionally resonant phrase that could be read in more than one way.

Have you noticed? Both ad men and Nazis have a knack for cooking up language that evades the cortex and speaks directly to the reptile brain. It’s no wonder that the former sometimes end up reminding people of the latter, even without intending to.

In a seminar on the history of fascism, our professor described the Nazi coinage Gleichschaltung, a word that signified the streamlining and merging of organizational structures to align them with ultra-modern, ostensibly scientific, National Socialist goals. (We prefer not to remember how many intellectuals and celebrities in the English-speaking world — Charles Lindbergh, for instance — admired the anti-democratic spirit of Gleichschaltung.)

The word Gleichschaltung combines gleich (“same, equal”) with Schaltung (“switching,” a word that had high-tech electronic associations at the time). One German-English dictionary of the 1930s translated it as “streamlining,” and postwar translators have tried “forcible coordination” and “consolidation of institutional powers.”

So our seminar leader challenged us to come up with an English translation of Gleichschaltung. I thought I had one. Synergy.

I should explain: Because Gleichschaltung was a Nazi coinage, for propaganda purposes, the feeling and emotional effect of the word are more important than its semantic freight. Part of the word’s devilish cleverness is its appropriation of “equality” (through the word gleich) to serve a concept that sought to crush individualism. It also appropriated (through Schaltung) the mystical aura of technology and the assumption that “progress” is unstoppable.

Do we have a word like this in English? I think we do. It’s “synergy.”

Synergy takes a classical prefix (syn-) that suggests unity and sounds like “sin,” a mischievous word beloved by advertisers. The rest of the word sounds like energy, a word with so many positive associations that our despised oil companies keep referring to themselves these days as “energy companies.” Maybe this is why synergy glows like an HDTV.

To be fair, synergy is not a brand-new word, but has popped up rarely over the last three centuries as a Greek-derived word for “cooperation.” (The related synergism has a different, technical meaning to epidemiologists and other specialists.)

But the word’s emergence as a superstar buzzword (since the ’80s) has nothing to do with its history. As used in the biz world, synergy has more feeling than meaning. And it never means plain old “cooperation” or “working together.”

In the context of (for example) corporate mergers, synergy suggests something a lot like the Nazis’ Gleichschaltung: Getting everyone to hew to the same party line, to seek the same goals, while submerging the good of individuals for the sake of the corporate entity. I mistrust the word.

Chicken joke: Goethe

Today’s chicken joke queries Goethe in his own language.

Q: Warum hat der Hahn die Straße überquert?

Goethe: Das Ewig-Weibchenliche zog ihn hinüber.

Translation: Why did the chicken cross the road? The Eternal Hen lured him across.

I think this one works a little better in German than English. It imposes the rustic word Weibchen, signifying a hen or any female animal, onto the “Eternal Feminine” (das Ewig-Weibliche) of the famous closing lines of Faust, Part 2.

[More chicken jokes / Noch mehr Hühnerwitze]

Perfect day in Alabama

So on Friday my wife and I strolled beside a lake in north Alabama. We admired blue herons and Canada geese, we marveled at a stray sandpiper and a loon from the northern lakes, the way it vanished under water like a thought, and the wild calls it made.

It was a perfect day to be in the Tennessee River valley, car windows down, jackets unzipped, strangers beaming at one another. From a high bluff we gazed down deep into Buck’s Pocket, and even the baying of hounds and the odd gunshot sounded like part of a celebration. Alabama teems with life and beauty, and for all the blundering damage we do, we can’t spoil it all.

Only a German Lit major would think of this, but I just had to track down the devil’s complaint to Faust (in Goethe’s Faust, Part I). It’s about trying to do evil but only contributing to the good:

Was sich dem Nichts entgegenstellt,
Das Etwas, diese plumpe Welt,
So viel als ich schon unternommen,
Ich wußte nicht ihr beizukommen,
Mit Wellen, Stürmen, Schütteln, Brand -
Geruhig bleibt am Ende Meer und Land!
Und dem verdammten Zeug, der Tier- und Menschenbrut,
Dem ist nun gar nichts anzuhaben:
Wie viele hab ich schon begraben!
Und immer zirkuliert ein neues, frisches Blut.

In essence, the devil Mephistopheles is griping that despite all his efforts to trouble the earth and sea, and to wipe out the whole detestable brood of animals and humans, the earth is still serene and there is always “new, fresh blood” out there — always plenty of warm, grubby Something to overwhelm the purity of Nothing. What’s a poor devil to do?

I know cultural pessimism * has a venerable history in Western civilization, but I am inclined not to take part in it. (I guess I can claim Goethe for company in this.) Plodding mankind is not what reality is all about. Even if we succeed in doing ourselves in — and I’m not sure we could if we tried — but even then, life on earth will continue without us, thriving and changing as ever. I haven’t always believed in God, but somehow I’ve always believed in the poem “God’s Grandeur.” Or when I’ve been tempted not to, countless experiences have reminded me that “nature is never spent” and that “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

I guess my gushing optimism is in danger of making nonsense of my title: What day isn’t perfect? Why make comparisons at all? I guess it’s just that some times and places are easier for our self-engrossed selves to appreciate. For me, Friday in north Alabama was among these.

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* Vid. the (lost) golden age, original sin, the tragedy of the commons, etc., etc.