Prose and Passion

Thursday, March 23, 2023

farm work at Bad Landeck

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 28.

Hedwig Geppert (the milkmaid in this entry) worked on various farms in Silesia during the years 1935 to 1940, when she married Paul Gellrich. On several occasions she found work in Bad Landeck (today: Lądek-Zdrój ). One employer marked in her work record was Erich Straube, Auenstr. 17 - clearly legible because he had a big fat rubber stamp for this information. The other entries are hand-written, so as best I can decipher them, they may be called: Paul Wegner; Elfriede Freudenreich; Franz Seipel; Kurt Müller. These are all at Bad Landeck, I skipped a few names based elsewhere.

Now we have a lovely series of photographs stamped by the drugstore at Bad Landeck, showing Hedwig and male colleagues working in the field in glorious sepia tones:

I'm sure there must be a 19th century painting with a very similar scene and composition?

NB it's the late 1930s but machines are still driven by real horse power ...

... or by real man power.

Here's another one, also from Landeck but from a separate film, without the sepia tones.

The Bad Landeck set also includes two portraits of a woman unknown to us - I read her attitude in these pictures as indicating that she may have been the boss of the farm workers? In which case the whole series may relate to the farm of Elfriede Freudenreich, where Hedwig worked 1.4.1937 to 23.11.1938. That's the longest period she has worked on the same farm, so it would make sense to get some photos of the colleagues and even the boss? Here's the better photo of the two:

Looking at Gedbas.de, there are tons of Freudenreich people in Alsace, but not that many in Silesia. There appear to have been some in Kreis Frankenstein, in places like Schlottendorf and Alt Altmannsdorf, which is interesting to us, and even better this Josef Freudenreich born 1868 in Schlottendorf died in Bad Landeck in 1935. So conceivably Elfriede could have been his daughter and have inherited the farm from him.

Should anybody have any answers to some of the many questions I am raising in this series, please leave a comment here (I'll need to vet it, so it may take a few days before it goes public) or contact me at michaelgrr [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk

Navigation tools:

Season 2 so far:

I started a twitter thread for season 2 here. However, as the bird site seems to be turning into an evil empire, I have now switched to logging the entries in a similar thread on Mastodon.

The twitter thread for season 1 is still here. It only loads 30 tweets at first, so you have to click "show more" a couple of times to get all 40 entries. Alternatively, visit the last instalment and find the numbered list of entries at the bottom.

I'm also adding all photos from this series to my family history album on flickr.

Thursday, March 16, 2023

a gathering at Gellrichs

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 27.

here we have Hedwig Scholz again, matron of the household with three Hedwigs (her husband Paul Gellrich sr. is around but doesn't show his face very often!), although we only saw two of them in the last entry (the third one finally emerged here). The year is 1944, and the location is the same as the last time we visited (in 1941/42), with the conspicuous low brick wall shielding the steps to the door, and a scaffolding for vines under the window - probably the Scholz/Gellrichs' farm at Gross-Olbersdorf:

We have Hedwig Scholz sitting at the front (right) and looking as grumpy as she always does. Behind her on the right, carrying the baby, is her son in law, Max Fuss, but there's no sign of the baby's mother Maria (Mike). As for everybody else, we are entirely clueless as to who these people are. On the far left, the young woman was in the photos of the three Hedwigs entry but eventually turned out not to be the third Hedwig I was looking for. The older woman sitting front left also pops up in other photos, but remains anonymous. same for the woman standing behind her. All very mysterious people.

To mix things up a bit, here is a second photo obviously taken on the same occasion, but with participants shuffled around just a bit. We now see Hedwig's daughter Maria holding the child - so presumably she took the first photo and the woman who now disappeared took the second.

Navigation tools:

Season 2 so far:

I started a twitter thread for season 2 here. However, as the bird site seems to be turning into an evil empire, I have now switched to logging the entries in a similar thread on Mastodon.

I'm also adding all photos from this series to my family history album on flickr.

Monday, March 13, 2023

the lynx effect

We are officially in the decade of ecosystem restoration and the top predators of a given ecosystem obviously have a role to play in that. However, reintroduction of carnivores like lynx, wolf and bear often faces fierce resistance from those humans who have usurped their roles of killing the herbivores.

A couple of new papers on the genetic health of Eurasian lynx populations in Europe served as the excuse to have a look at the situation of the typical carnivores of the northern latitudes and any attempts at reintroducing them.

The feature is out now:

Caring for carnivores

Current Biology Volume 33, Issue 5, 13. March 2023, Pages R159-R162

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)

The Eurasian lynx, although not endangered, is a keystone species missing from much of western Europe. (Photo: Nicky Pe/Pixabay.)

Thursday, March 09, 2023

a semi-mysterious aunt

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 26.

Aunt Therese, who appears in the photos below, is semi-mysterious because we know whose aunt she is, but not whose sister she is. She could be a sister of Ernst Leopold the steelworker or of his wife Auguste, or indeed one of Auguste's half siblings from the earlier patches of the East Prussian patchwork family. Thus, Therese's maiden name can have been any of these three: Kosmowsky, Faust, Wittke.

Ernst and Auguste's son Fritz labelled the photos below quite carefully, saying that the lady on the right is called Therese Vietz and is his aunt. However, in a list of allegedly all the siblings of his father he didn't include her. In a list of the siblings of Auguste, he didn't include her either, but at least he didn't claim the list to be complete and he admitted to being a bit hazy about the earlier patches of the patchwork. Hence my guess that she might fit in there but we don't really know. We don't know either what became of the Mr Vietz she appears to have married.

So, well, here comes the semi-mysterious aunt first in 1950 outside Auguste's home in Knappenstraße 43, Duisburg-Hamborn (we've seen Auguste entering that very same door here). The other woman is a neighbour called Frau Majer, who lived in number 51, where Auguste's sister Johanna also lived with her husband Fritz Krieger (both appeared here). The girl is Karin and the dog Molly. No idea who these two belong to.

I love the light in this photo.

And then with Fritz's wife Mathilde in their flat in 1953:

Looking for Vietz people on GedBas, I found this family which was active in Kreis Wehlau, like Auguste's paternal line, and featured a marriage with a Witt woman (one of the daughters of the Wittke patch in East Prussia also married a Witt), so it appears entirely possible that Therese found her husband in East Prussia. The most recent Vietz in that database is Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Vietz 1872-1915.

Navigation tools:

Season 2 so far:

I started a twitter thread for season 2 here. However, as the bird site seems to be turning into an evil empire, I have now switched to logging the entries in a similar thread on Mastodon.

I'm also adding all photos from this series to my family history album on flickr.

Thursday, March 02, 2023

old aunts and young children

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 25.

We have seen the three daughters from the bakery Adam Eberle at Lorsch as children here and two as young women here, but of course the surviving family remember them as old aunts who shared a household and a famously Spartan lifestyle. I was told they pinched every penny and never threw any food away even if it had gone off, even though they had considerable savings in the bank and owned property.

So here are some old aunty pics with select members of my generation, first all three in August 1961 with one of my cousins. I think this is the back of the house in Bahnhofstraße 27 where the bakery was many years before:

Aunt Anna worked as a community nurse and apparently never took off her uniform:

from the same set a scene at the dinner table to appreciate the interiors:

... and then Anna and Babette in August 1964 with yours truly (not sure of the location):

Dina had died in 1963.

NB this is my debut appearance in the series. In series 1, I had set my birth year as the cutoff, but in season 2 I loosened the rules to allow pictures from the mid and late 1960s as well.

Navigation tools:

Season 2 so far:

I started a twitter thread for season 2 here. However, as the bird site seems to be turning into an evil empire, I have now switched to logging the entries in a similar thread on Mastodon.

I'm also adding all photos from this series to my family history album on flickr.

Wednesday, March 01, 2023

back to Suzuki school

Four months into the adventure sparked by my aunt's ancient violin, I feel I'm ready to use more interesting fingerings than the 1-2-3 that will get you through most folk tunes. So I was glad to discover vols 2 and 3 of Suzuki violin school at Oxfam. There is a big overlap in the pieces used at the same stage in the cello school, so I have much of the music in my head already (a fifth down, as they are arranged to fit easily on the respective instruments).

I started with Boccherini's very famous minuet and Dvorak's humoresque (Passengers will please refrain ...). Both great fun to play and not actually too hard if you have the tune in your head. As I hoped, Suzuki includes fingerings to alert me to the places where it makes sense to depart from the standard (folk) fingering. Watch this space.

The editions date from 1970 and lack the piano part but I don't mind. Might go back for vol 4, but I didn't recognise any of the pieces, that may be the point where violin and cello editions go different ways, following the specific repertoire of each instrument. Note also that the editions are A4 format - they date from before the availability of photocopying, to which publishers responded by printing larger formats not so easily copied.

PS speaking of Dvorak, it just dawned on me (after this entry went live) that I have a printout of his sonatina Op 100, which I played on the flute back in 2017. Now that's a nice little project ...

Update 10.3. A video of this month's Slow Session has appeared here, where you can see me fiddling ...

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

post-plague Bach project

Plague Year(s) Bach Project, 3-year anniversary

Three years after starting the Plague Year Bach Project, I'm not convinced that the pandemic is over, but I do realise that in the absence of lockdowns I'm not making much progress with memorising the suites. With everything else going on (and my shoulder still playing up sometimes), one movement per month (or two months) has turned into half a movement in four months, so I guess it's time to make a new plan.

I now have six movements that I can play from memory, so I'll keep these on the revision cycle to make sure they stay in my memory. They tend to survive my occasional 10-day trips abroad, but I would forget them if I stopped playing on the timescale of months.

memory list:
1.3 Courante
1.4 Sarabande
1.5 Minuet I&II- VIDEO
1.6 Gigue
2.5 Minuet I&II
3.5 Bourree I&II - VIDEO

And the other part of my daily Bach practice / meditation will be sight-reading of one of the six movements I had (partially) memorised before, just keeping the vague familiarity, without keeping the notes in my head. Making more regular use of sight-reading should also be beneficial for my orchestral adventures and chamber music ambitions.

reading list:
2.4 Sarabande
2.6 Gigue
3.4 Sarabande
3.6. Gigue
4.3. Courante
4.5. Bourree I & II

I still haven't got much patience for these two, but might retry them once in a while (would be nice to be able to play the entire first suite):
1.1. Prelude
1.2 Allemande

A Westbury cello I spotted in a charity shop earlier this month and considered buying (as old Heinrich will at some point run off with the young cellist). I played some fragments of Bach suites in the shop. It did sound lovely and looked unused, which is a bit of a tragedy. After some consideration, I think I'll hold out for an old and battered instrument that needs rescuing. I am also making progress with the old family fiddle (blog entry coming up tomorrow), so if and when I end up without a cello in the house I still have some strings to scratch with a bow.

PS In these last 3 years of daily cello practice I have also managed to use up the first new bow hair that we put on Heinrich's old bow back in 2009. As the young cellist uses a different bow, this is exclusively my work - and I will have a go at replacing it myself.

Monday, February 27, 2023

a flamboyance of flamingos

Flamingos are eternal favourites of visitors in zoos everywhere and have been held in captivity for centuries. Surprisingly, it still isn't all that easy to breed them successfully, and only a few zoos have succeeded on that front. A recent review of reproductive success or lack thereof using the ZIMS (Zoological Information Management System) database of life history information gathered in zoos around the world has led to new recommendations. More generally, the findings highlight the issue that, if zoos are to act as a refuge for endangered species, we have to make sure we understand their life histories well enough. Other recent zoo stories covered include the longevity of parrots, cancer risks in mammals, and rewilding of sea otters.

If you always wondered how to breed flamingos (or how to rewild sea otters), here are some answers:

Learning lessons at the zoo

Current Biology Volume 33, Issue 4, 27. February 2023, Pages R123-R126

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)

Flamingos use their characteristically bent beaks upside down for filter feeding on plankton. This is a P. jamesi in Bolivia. (Photo: Murray Foubister/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).)

PSA: I'm not on Instagram myself, but I believe if you follow CurrentBiology there, you'll find my features highlighted there as well.

PS 6.3.2023 Speaking of zoos, here's the director of London Zoo on their new offer of £ 3 tickets for ppl on benefits. (I was a bit shocked that the regular price is 10 times more, but then again I haven't been at a zoo in decades.)

Friday, February 24, 2023

deep down

The February issue of C & I contains two deep-sea related items from me, namely my feature on the likely beginning of commercial seafloor mining:

Plumbing new depths

Chemistry & Industry Volume 87, Issue 2, February 2023, Pages 18-21

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF)

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

... and my long essay review of the short and unusual memoir "My life in sea creatures" by Sabrina Imbler.

A diverse life

Chemistry & Industry Volume 87, Issue 2, January 2023, Page 35

access via:

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

SCI (premium content, ie members only)

Blackwells

Thursday, February 23, 2023

young Frieda

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 24.

Frieda the pianist was born 1902 and thus grew up just before people had their own cameras and documented their everyday lives, so all we have from her childhood are professional studio portraits of her as a baby and as a teenage debutante, plus half a dozen tiny cutouts from school photos.

So, looking at the early childhood only, here comes the cute baby Frieda:

followed by a few cutouts from school photos (maybe she didn't like her class mates all that much?):

I'll do the teenage pics in a separate entry some time ...

Navigation tools:

Season 2 so far:

I started a twitter thread for season 2 here. However, as the bird site seems to be turning into an evil empire, I have now switched to logging the entries in a similar thread on Mastodon.

I'm also adding all photos from this series to my family history album on flickr.

Sunday, February 19, 2023

words lost and found

Some thoughts on

The dictionary of lost words
Pip Williams
Vintage Paperback 2022

Shortly after reading and reviewing The looking-glass house, I spotted this paperback at The Works and was attracted to the idiosyncratic title and the map of Victorian Oxford included at the front. Always fun to wander the streets of Victorian Oxford in fiction, as it is instantly recognisable but also interestingly different.

The focus of the book is a place I actually cycled and walked past many times. Of course I have read the blue plaque on the Banbury Road which enlightens us that the first Oxford English Dictionary was born in a garden shed on this site. It was the shed grandiosely named the “Scriptorium” in the garden of the first editor, James Murray, where staff collected words and crafted definitions for decades.

The story is well documented and reported, of course, but what Pip Williams does is to analyse how the words and definitions were biased by the fact that all editors on site were men of a very similar social background. To this end, she introduces a fictional girl, Esme, growing up in the circle and becoming a lexicographer herself, and uses her to interrogate why words such as bondmaid and cunt aren’t included in the dictionary. Funnily enough the latter just got underlined in red as isn’t in the dictionary of my word processing software either – looks like the Victorian times never ended.

The novel spans the story of Esme’s entire life, which is heartwarming throughout. In spite of the various troubles in the world (including the Great War and the suffragists movement) and in her life, the warm glow never fades. There is no real evil in her world, which one could perhaps criticise as naïve, but I think it reflects in a way the ivory tower perspective that you get when you’re fully immersed in a major academic project such as the dictionary. Implausibly vast and extremely slow moving, this kind of work will only have been tolerated by people who cared about it to an obsessive degree, so the normal rules of competitive capitalism wouldn’t apply.

There is also something Carrollean in the way Esme explores the weird and wonderful worlds of Oxford and lexicography. Born in the early 1880s, fictional Esme is a generation younger than real life Alice Liddell, so it makes sense to read this after The looking-glass house.

So, it may be a fairy tale for adults, but I would highly recommend it as an escape from today’s harsh reality and news cycle. Also as an introduction to Oxford – the place hasn’t changed all that much, even the map is still useful today.

Blackwells

Thursday, February 16, 2023

mystery solved

Every picture tells a story, season 2, picture 23.

In the old album from which I scanned two of the photos of Gertrud Gross last week I also found a possible solution to a mystery that had troubled me for a whole year, so here's a little detective story.

A year ago I discovered a huge frame with a photo from around 1900 showing a large group of people posing outdoors, on the edge of a forest. Only trouble is I had no idea who these people were or why my grandparents had kept this photo apparently showing random people of their grandparents' generation (at the very least it is quite obviously not a family gathering). As their combined eight grandparents come from five different geographic areas spanning the entire East-West width of the German Empire as it was before 1914, this photo could come from just about anywhere.

Here it is (in a hurried 12 megapixel snap, I need to get a better scan of it some time, if I can find a big scanner):

In my desperate quest for clues, I even posted the photo on Flickr where it attracted lots of views, but other than the amusing suggestion that the uniformed guy might be Hindenburg, I had no luck there either.

In an old album compiled by either Heinrich the cellist or his only child Richard in an attempt at visual family history, I found the possible answer. The album starts with photos of Heinrich's parents, Johann Friedrich Richard Groß (*1852 in Breslau) and Maria Louise Mentzel (*1844 Skronskau). On the first page we have young Heinrich as a schoolboy in 1892, and then this:

which strikes me as a similar if slightly smaller grouping of nature lovers. In a barely legible marking (dark blue on black cardboard) we are informed that railway man Richard is the guy on the left (looks consistent with the very few other pictures I had from him so far, see these pics from Tangermünde), while his wife Maria is the central figure on the top of the rock. Going back to the big mystery picture with this new reference point, I would suggest that Richard is this guy, just right of centre (which I define by the mirror symmetry of the two men reclining on the ground):

Still not sure if his wife Maria is also in the big picture. Come to think of it, one of the younger women could be Gertrud. May have to go back to it, get it out of the frame and do a proper scan.

And we still don't know who everybody else is and what the group activity was. Maybe a Wanderverein (ramblers' association)? There were many such associations in Kaiser Wilhelm's empire, see this wikipedia entry (in German) for a bit of history. What is today the Deutscher Wanderverband counted 60 local associations and 165,000 members on its 25th anniversary in 1908.

The "Wandervogel" movement also happened around that time, but that was all about young people, while here we clearly have a more middle-aged gathering. Richard and Maria lived at Tangermünde / Stendal, which isn't all that far away from the Harz mountain range, a classical Wanderer territory.

Navigation tools:

Season 2 so far:

I started a twitter thread for season 2 here. However, as the bird site seems to be turning into an evil empire, I have now switched to logging the entries in a similar thread on Mastodon.

I'm also adding all photos from this series to my family history album on flickr.

Prose and Passion

Thursday, March 23, 2023

Thursday, March 16, 2023

Monday, March 13, 2023

Thursday, March 09, 2023

Thursday, March 02, 2023

Wednesday, March 01, 2023

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Monday, February 27, 2023

Friday, February 24, 2023

Thursday, February 23, 2023

Sunday, February 19, 2023

Thursday, February 16, 2023

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