ladies of honour looking for dancers

a serendipitous find possibly of interest to the Krefeld Clan.

On a tumblr blog that posts lots of old postcards I discovered this group photo of young women from Krefeld, who in 1906 served as ladies of honour to welcome the emperor Wilhelm II to the city:

Die Ehrendamen beim Besuch Kaiser Wilhelm II in Krefeld, 2. April 1906. Source.

When I tried to find out who they were (seeing that our Krefeld Clan relatives had plenty of eligible daughters around that time), I discovered another group photo from an earlier imperial visit, and an amusing story to connect these two.

A few years earlier, the Kaiser had visited Krefeld on to celebrate the city's 200th anniversary of being part of the Kingdom of Prussia. (NB people in the Rhineland had rather mixed feelings about being ruled by faraway Prussia, but I guess by the time the 200th anniversary arrived they had gotten used to it.) On this visit, 20 young women of the city, all dressed in white, lined the stairs of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum (built in 1894-97 as a memorial to Wilhelm I and still standing today) to welcome the monarch. Reportedly, he was quite impressed by this welcome and asked for their group photo to be taken:

Die Krefelder Ehrendamen beim Empfang der Kaiserl. Majestäten am 20. Juni 1902. Verkleinerung der von seiner Majestät gewünschten Original-Photographie. Source.

Various copies of this postcard are available for sale online (eg here and here). I'm dreaming of finding one with the inscription "hey look that's me" or at least with a useful name.

Legend has it (see eg here) that in subsequent smalltalk with the ladies, Wilhelm inquired whether they went out to dance quite regularly. He heard complaints that the young men of the city only had their textile businesses in mind so there wasn't all that much dancing happening. On the spot, the emperor promised to send some officers to Krefeld for the ladies to dance with. Chances are that the plans were already being hatched beforehand, but he did indeed order the 11th regiment of Hussars to be moved from Düsseldorf to Krefeld. That move happened on April 2 1906, and the emperor underlined his role in the deal by personally leading the regiment on the last mile into the city. The painter Carl Röhling immortalised the scene:

Source

Obviously, ladies dressed in white were lined up and photographed again on this occasion, hence the postcard photo dated 1906 shown at the top.

The soldiers were known as the Tanzhusaren in reference to the story:

Source: Wikipedia

Of course the residence of the regiment in the city only lasted eight years until the hussars were sent to France for a fight in which their role as dashing horsemen soon proved to be obsolete. Much like the monarchy and the ladies of honour, so those pictures are a bit like a last hurrah of that world about to vanish.

a new capital in the jungle

This August, Indonesia is due to inaugurate its new capital, Nusantara, located in a remote site surrounded by the rainforest of Borneo. I took this as an opportunity to look more closely at the conservation and climate challenges the country is facing. The resulting feature is out today:

From Jakarta to the jungle

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 14, 22 July 2024, Pages R663-R665

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

Last year's thread is here .

President Joko Widodo and others planting meranti tembaga (Shorea leprosula) trees in the new capital city of Indonesia, Nusantara. (Photo: BPMI President’s Secretariat/Muchlis Jr.)

oceans on the brink

In the last 12,000 years, while humans were busy replacing the terrestrial ecosystems with agriculture and infrastructure, the oceans had a reprieve due to their inaccessibility. Only since the 19th century did the oceans begin to suffer the consequences of humanity's world domination, beginning with industrial scale whaling and not ending with climate change killing off coral reefs and the rush towards deep-sea mining endangering even the remoter parts of the sea floor.

This could make for a rather depressing story of a paradise lost, but with their book At every depths, Tessa Hill and Eric Simons manage to make it more interesting by emphasising the things we are only beginning to understand and also the traditional knowledge of coastal and seafaring populations that has been ignored by modern science and almost been forgotten. This angle, covering things like the clam gardens of Hawaii and the long-distance journeys of the polynesian voyagers who settled everything from New Zealand to Hawaii, makes for the most surprising and fascinating stories here.

More about all this in my essay review which is out now:

Exploration vs exploitation

Chemistry & Industry Volume 88, Issue 7-8, July/August 2024, Page 34

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

As always, I'm happy to send a PDF on request.

upstream journey

Some thoughts on

The Danube: A Journey Upriver from the Black Sea to the Black Forest
Nick Thorpe
Yale University Press 2014

I have spent 6.5 years living at Regensburg less than 250 metres from the banks of the Danube. For the first three years, it was so close that its waters came up to our front door once. And yet, much of its watershed still feels exotic to me - as my family history typically drains into the North Sea or rarely into the Baltic. I can think of only two Danubian links, the Black Sea migrants and an elusive Austrian soldier who came to Baden in the 1790s, but his past remains obscure. I have visited Vienna and Budapest but not much else.

Anyhow, as a balance to obsessing about the river Rhine, I felt obliged to read this Danubian travelogue when I discovered it. In the process, I learned a lot about the complex history of the Balkans and the Ottoman influences travelling upstream into Europe, including coffee, tobacco and paprika. I guess this cultural drift from East to West (along with the movement of modern day migrants) was what motivated the author to travel against the flow. Otherwise, most travellers, especially if they use bikes or boats, will prefer to go downstream, from Donaueschingen to the Black Sea, like my ancestors did back in 1806.

The author is a BBC journalist who has been based at Budapest for several decades, so the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and Eastern Bloc histories are his strength. Upstream of Passau he loses interest a bit - for instance he misses out completely on everything that makes Regensburg special (much like Alexander McCall Smith whose novels allegedly set there have no sense of place whatsoever). And some of the information on German things appears to be confused. For instance he mentions Ingolstadt as a car manufacturing city and then goes on about Opel which is based elsewhere. The famous Ingolstadt car manufacturer is of course Audi.

Also, at the very end, he discusses the work of German adventure writer Karl May (1842-1912), dwelling on his Old Shatterhand persona in the Wild West (with absolutely no connection to the Danube), but forgetting to mention the book "In den Schluchten des Balkan" (1892), which describes an itinerary probably not all that far from the Danube.

So I guess I would recommend it for the stretch of Belgrade to Vienna. For the Black Sea, I prefer Neal Ascherson's eponymous book, and Germany is much more vividly represented in Simon Winder's Germania (incidentally, Winder also has a book about the Danube region which I haven't got yet). Still, it might become handy for a feature on Danubian ecosystems one day. Watch this space.

Blackwells

we're drugging the biosphere

During the plague years I have often mentioned that things like virus fragments can be readily detected in wastewater, and that with the same methodology researchers can also describe the distribution of drug use, eg for cocaine. This is quite routine now, but what amazingly hasn't been done very often is to look at the impact our drugs - including the legal as well as the illegal kind - have on ecosystems when they escape into the water systems. The first global survey attempting to estimate the impacts of drug pollution in the environment only happened two years ago. So I thought this endeavour could do with a bit of a shout-out, which is why it is the subject of my latest feature, out now:

Drugging the biosphere

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 13, 8 July 2024, Pages R605-R607

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

Last year's thread is here .

A wide variety of drugs is helping us to stay healthy for longer, but the effects the active ingredients may have on other species after our use are too little understood. (Photo: Myriam Zilles/Unsplash.)

ecology book coming soon

New book alert!

Over the last 13 years, as I have been writing a feature for (almost) every issue of Current Biology, the focus of my writing work gravitated towards topics that could be described as ecology in the broadest sense, ranging from microbial interactions to global nutrient cycles and also including the fringes of ecology such as human interference in nature, soundscape ecology, behavioural ecology etc.

True to my ancient motto "Only connect!" I was often attracted to these topics by the satisfaction of uncovering how everything is connected to everything else. Over time, more than 300 features have piled up and grown into a heavily connected and crosslinked body of texts. Even though the vast majority of these (everything older than 12 months) are openly accessible to all, I fear that not many people will click their way through these.

Therefore, I attempted to remix some of the lessons I have learned in these years into book format. The resulting 400 page doorstopper is now on track to be published on October 15 by Johns Hopkins University Press (who have also published Astrobiology in 3 editions over the last 18 years). So expect more plugs, excerpts, blatant advertising, as the date approches. Here, as a teaser, I'll just share a glimpse of the lovely cover (and thereby also reveal the title):

Cover of
Intertwined
From Insects to Icebergs
by Michael Gross
Johns Hopkins University Press October 2024