Changes: Seasonal and Phase

Morning ski trails on a local lake: 

The newer path diverging left is incuse while the older path on the right appears in relief. This effect is from snow melting around the compacted tracks; the relief tracks will indeed be some of the last traces of winter as the snow reverts to its liquid state. 

Another view under different light:

incuse right; relief left

Some tracks were pocked by leaf prints:

Closer up:

The leaves were not passively revealed by melting; rather, they blew in from shore the previous day and due to their darker color they melted in place, actively boring through snow and ice. In this small way the old season hastens the new. 

The Somme Then And Now

The assault phase of the Battle of the Somme commenced 10 minutes after the blowing of the Hawthorne mine. The original black and white footage is from a full-length, silent documentary film, The Battle Of The Somme (1916).  That film has been digitized and set back to the original camera speed (something I worried about back here). Watch the original film here. It's lengthy, but worth it.

A couple years ago, two amateur filmmakers skilfully blended past and present cinematography. You won't realize what they've done for a minute or so but then it's incredible! The film is poignant too: Most of these men would be dead 40 minutes after this film was made.

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Britian's Secret Terror Weapon At The Somme

100 years ago tonight, British engineers were secretly installing four 56 ft long, 2.5 ton machines called "Squirts" by their operators and "Judgements" by more senior officers. History calls them Liven's Large Gallery Flame Projector.

British Flame Projector. First used by British at the Battle of the Somme, 1st July, 1916. Range 40 to 50 yards. Oil was forced through pipes under pressure, and ignited at a jet.

Here is a British TV presentation of the weapon and its excavation at the Somme battlefield in France. Yes it was real and yes, they did find the remains.

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Landscape Still Scarred Where The Somme Battle Was Fought In France

Drone imagery shows how the landscape from the Battle of the Somme is still scarred 100 years later

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Letters Home: Greetings From Marktredwitz

A postcard my father sent home during his Army service in Germany 1951-53 (click on the tag "Letters Home" for the whole series):

Click to enlarge. Clockwise from top left: [1] Schlageterstrasse, [2] Kreuzstrasse, [3] Krankenhaus, [4] Schillerstrasse. Note the name Marktredwitz is in the old Fraktur script lettering. The Nazis had a love-hate relationship with that style and ultimately sought to limit its use.

The reverse reads:

July 12, 1953

Hi Mom,

I am spending the weekend in Marktredwitz. I have been swimming twice. I am staying at my girlfriends house. They live in a small rented apartment. I will sign off for now.

Love V.

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[1] Schlageterstrasse was named after Albert Leo Schlageter who was heralded by the Third Reich. Many German streets were renamed Schlageterstrasse or Albert-Leo-Schlageterstrasse during the NS times. After the war, many were subsequently renamed. By 1953, de-nazification had not yet reached the smaller towns.

[2] Kreuzstrasse, which means, I believe, simply Crossroad.

[3] Krankenhaus, literally the "Sick House", or the hospital.

[4] Schillerstrasse was named after Friedrich Schiller, the great German poet and philosopher.

Letters Home: "I'm spending the day in Heidelberg"

Heidelberg: View from Philosophenweg in 1953

 My father wrote the following message on the postcard pictured above:

March 24, 1953
Heidelberg

Dear Mom,

I am spending the day in Heidelberg. I had to drive a Lt. down here to 7th army headquarters 76 miles from Hanau. It sure is a nice day. Yesterday was our warmest day, 69°.  I suppose it's warming up around there too. The farmers are out in the fields plowing.

Love, V.

That's the Heidelberg Castle or Schloß in that early 1950's postcard. The view has scarcely changed since then thanks to stringent zoning laws.

In the early 1990s we had a young friend who was a native Heidelberger. His parents lived outside the city limits and we spent many a long, beer-soaked weekend there. He showed us around town and one day he surprised us by taking us up into the hills to an interesting but lesser known site called Thingstätte. 

Thingstätte is the name for an open-air amphitheater inspired by Heidelberg native Albert Speer. Numerous outdoor amphitheaters were planned and built throughout the Third Reich during the early 1930s, but were disused because radio broadcasting proved a more effective means of mass communication.

The Heidelberg Thingstätte was built on a site sacred to ancient pagan worshippers. Our friend told us that "they built it but he [Hitler] never came."  After the war the Thingstätte become an "unloved inheritance from the Third Reich."  More info can be found here.

Heidelberger Thingstaette

Thingstätte is an interesting word. First, the "Th" combination is orthographically rare in German and went the way of the Neanderthal some years ago. "Thing" is cognate with our word "thing" (in modern German, Dinge). A quick look at the OED etymology of "thing" gives a sense of the old Germanic meaning now lost in modern English.

The Thingbewegung "Thing Movement" was the closest that the Nazi party had to spiritual core beliefs. Josef Goebbels wrote of the Heidelberg Thingstätte:

In diesem monumentalen Bau haben wir unserem Stil und unserer Lebensauffassung einen lebendigen plastischen und monumentalen Ausdruck gegeben. Diese Stätten sind in Wirklichkeit die Landtage* unserer Zeit. Es wird ein Tag kommen, wo das deutsche Volk zu diesen steinernen Stätten wandelt, um sich auf ihnen in kultischen Spielen zu seinem unvergänglichen neuen Leben zu bekennen.

In this monumental construction, we have given living sculptural and monumental expression to our style and approach to life. These sites are in reality the Statehouses* of our time. There will come a day when the German people will convene to these stone sites in order to avow their new eternal life in ritual drama.

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*The German word Landtag has no satisfactory English equivalent. Some dictionaries give Parliament, others Diet. The meaning here is an outdoor gathering place for elected leaders.

Old World Wisconsin: Oh the Germanity!

Holmes:

Milwaukee's vocabulary is still replete with adopted German words and expressions. Hannah Jacobson found the city's dialect sufficiently unusual to furnish her theme for a B.A. degree thesis at the University of Wisconsin. She discovered :"Ach" being used as an exclamation in everyday speech. Many Milwaukee children say "tante" for "aunt"; the streetcar bends (turns) the corner"; people "stay to home" (zu Hause) instead of "stay at home"; "I go by my aunt's house" instead of "I go to my aunt's house"; "make my apron shut" is a current idiom for the English "tie my apron"; "nix come eraus" is a customary byword for "nichts kommt heraus"; "set yourself down" is a translation of the request "setzen Sie sich nieder" and "Aufwiedersehen," a friendly farewell word, may be overheard on any Milwaukee street corner as companions part to go different ways.

Near the turn of the [20th] century, with the discontinuance of language papers and decline in the preaching of sermons in German, many of the cities began to lose their Old World flavor. The change is less noticeable in rural communities.*

-Fred L. Holmes, "Freiheit Ist Meine" Old World Wisconsin (1944)

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*I noted a few of my father's own curious rural Germanic idioms expressed in his letters home: here (footnote [2] and here (footnote [1]).

Old World Wisconsin: Avant Ouisconsin!

Jean Nicolet lands at Green Bay in 1634

Every Wisconsin school child learned (and I hope still does learn) that the French were the first Europeans to explore and map that territory. The name Wisconsin derives from an Algonquian language, but there's a story of how the French invented the name: link

Author Fred Holmes waxes nostalgic for traces of les Français, already long disappearing back in 1944:

Would you see historic places, authentic relics, hallowed ground? Would you hear the French folk songs of the first settlers sung by present-day descendants? Would you like to walk in paths bordered by old-fashioned flower gardens? Green Bay has all of them. She was the gateway to the Middle West opened wide by Frenchmen whose ineradicable imprint is still discernible after the passing of nearly two centuries.

Wisconsin is cognizant of its debt to the intrepid French explorer, priest and trader. Soon to stand in the shadow of the capitol dome at Madison will be the Bedore statue of Jean Nicolet,* the first white man to come to Wisconsin, who arrived at the Green Bay entrance in 1634; in the streets of De Pere, a tablet marks the site of the first mission founded by Pere Claude Allouez in 1620; the black-robed Father James Marquette, co-discoverer of the Mississippi in 1673, is one of the two representatives of the Statuary Hall in Washington; Charles de Langlade, "the bravest of the brave," who created the first farm out of the wilderness, is memorialized by a bronze cenotaph in the city of Green Bay; "Villa Louis" at Prairie du Chien and the "Grignon House" at Kaukauna have been rehabilitated to perpetuate the high cultural attainments of the French; and two State parks--Perrot and Brunet Island--designate localities where French fur traders conducted extensive operations. 

The early French who came to Wisconsin were pathfinders rather than empire builders. They preferred to trap; to wander in wilderness solitudes, and to puff a pipe at night around the fire, while telling other loiters of the incidents and exploits of the day. Their observations on the cunning of wild animals, the ingenuity of the beaver, the wariness of the muskrat--interspersed tales of their own courage and fearlessness.  The harsh struggle for existence and the rugged outdoor life gave these people an individuality of their own.

But war shattered the silence of their woodland security. The Black Hawk episode that made a trail across southwest Wisconsin in 1832 was to hasten the decline of the fur industry's supremacy. Soldiers scouting through the brush, around silver lakes, across verdant meadow lands and along fertile valley bottoms in search of the fleeing Sacs came to realize the possibilities for developing a home in such a country of contagious beauty and wild productivity. Their letters back home stirred the East. Soon came the the New Englanders and New Yorkers--typical, farseeing Yankee stock, who were to run the governmental affairs of Wisconsin in pretty much their own way until the end of the [19th] century. The greatest advance in American history had begun to take a form that was to roll westward until the vast continent was subjected to settlement. 

Green Bay and Prairie du Chien still radiate French tone and charm. For more than a century the French influence has been fading. Those who came as soldiers and traders in colonial times turned into farmers as economic conditions changed.

Three epochs of history mark the settlement of the French in Wisconsin. Many of the first to arrive were traders and trappers who came directly from France to engage in fur trade; the second influx came mostly from the French province of Quebec just before the Civil War and became active in the lumbering industry; the third were the remnants of both groups who remained to farm, once the timber had been removed and the log drives ended. This explains the the presence of French settlements along the rivers of Northern Wisconsin.

Four generations of life in Wisconsin have not eliminated the sharp inflection given to the pronunciation of many English words; nor removed, from ordinary conversation, expressions that sound odd though literally translated from the mother tongue. Characteristic among the French-Canadian is an emphasis on the last syllable so that "Frenchman" is pronounced as "French man" and "high school" as "high school"; or they pronounce beginning with a vowel with the letter "h" so that "oil" is articulated as if it were spelt "hoil" and "air" as "hair." Among the less educated "she" is commonly used after masculine nouns,---"Mrs. Demarse said of her dull boy--'my son Dolph, she funny boy.'" Expressions that are perfect in French become awkward when translated into English, "Me, I do not know him" (Moi, je ne le connais pas)--or "You, are you crazy, you?" (Vous, etes vous fou?). Among these people I found that the parents speak the native language to their children when they do not want strangers to know what they are saying. Otherwise, English is used in conversation about the home. Less frequent every year are the occasions for songs and recitations in French at school programs and entertainments.

While the romantic, religious days are fast leaving the lives of the French in Wisconsin, their devotion, respect, courtesy and hospitality to Old World ideals continue as inherited traits. 

-Fred L. Holmes, "Romantic Days Are Fading" Old World Wisconsin (1944)
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*The statue never made it to Madison but was instead placed near the spot where Nicolet came ashore in 1634. link  The statue has since been moved to a different site northeast of Green Bay. link

In A Bit Of A Rut

Pompeii ca. 1992

Spuren Noch Zwei

Cleveland (1984)

Spuren Noch

Cleveland (1984)

Hart wie Kruppstahl

I forgot to mark this yesterday:

On this day in 1796 the city of Cleveland was founded by Gen. Moses Cleaveland.

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