a catholic carolingian town

Lorsch is quite important in my family history but when I prepared the first set of lost cities entries, I struggled to find a suitable postcard, other than the ubiquitous Torhalle from around 900 (so a bit older than my records).

As my great-grandparents ran a bakery in the Bahnhofstrasse (station road), I now looked for postcards of that street specifically and found this one:

source

Not sure if the bakery is in it, and it is a bit hard to check as the building has disappeared, but I will visit and try to find out at some point.

What happened: The old baker, Adam Eberle (born 1863) married his cousin Anna Barbara Schütz in 1890 and set up the bakery at Bahnhofstraße 27 soon after. The town had around 3,800 residents then. He struggled initially and had to rely on agriculture and his relatives in the rural Odenwald region nearby for support. The four children had to help out as well, eg making deliveries. Nevertheless, the bakery ran for several decades, until around 1930. Anna Barbara died in 1934, Adam in 1938. The house remained in the possession of their three daughters until the last of them died in 1973. It was then sold to the city, which ended up demolishing it for road building. So the relevant dates for our series are 1890-1938/1973.

Lorsch, the site of a famous Carolingian abbey from 764, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was a small and very catholic town then, and the family rooted in the protestant hinterland has tended to blame all its difficulties on the hostile environment, but it is hard to check the truth behind that. Today's population is around 14,000. The town now takes pride in the byname "Karolingerstadt" - with no chance of living up to its Carolingian heyday.

Previously in the #lostcities series:

1. Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961
2. Strasbourg 1901 - 1908
3. Minden 1903 - 1952/ca.1970
4. Tangermünde 1888 - 1916
5. Rheydt 1923 - 1935
6. Königsberg 1935 - 1945
7. Aachen 1936 - 1940
8. Idar-Oberstein 1940 - 1962
9. Bad Nauheim 1945 - 1972/1983
10. Würzburg 1961 - 1968
11. Hamborn inlaws: 1922 - 1979/2015
12. Bonn 1929-1934

NB I have now added a second end date to the cities where other family members stayed on after the direct ancestors died. So far, that is the case for Minden, Bad Nauheim and Hamborn.

The Mastodon thread for season 2 starts here.

art to take part in

Some thoughts on
Yoko Ono: Music of the mind
Kunstsammlung NRW: K20
Düsseldorf
(until 16.3.2025)
(in collaboration with the Tate Modern)

I came to this exhibition a bit by accident and without knowing much about Yoko Ono beyond the bits that everybody knows, so it was an interesting learning experience. I found out that much of her work is based on the concept of making the audience create the art, eg by just displaying an object and an instruction what to do with it. Such as lots of white walls to draw or write on. or a blanket to create interesting shapes with. Some of the creations were naturally ephemeral, like the game of chess with two sets of white pieces, to be played until you lose track of which ones are yours (professional chess players probably wouldn't have much of a problem?), whereas the ones drawn on the walls presumably last (and evolve) as long as the exhibition.

The artist compared her work to that of a composer who only creates the score as an instruction, from which musicians then produce the work of art - with potentially different outcomes depending on how much effort and skill goes into the execution, the acoustic of the venue, the support of the audience, etc. I'm guessing that this is also the thought that inspired the title of the exhibition: the artist creates the art in the mind of the participating audience, much like the composer creates it in the mind of performing musicians.

In the last 10 years I have come to realise that (to me at least) trying to play music is much more enlightening and enjoyable than only listening to it, so this participatory approach to art made a lot of sense to me on that level. Even though in the event I didn't leave any permanent traces in the exhibition, as I was too busy watching other people responding to the instructions. In that sense it was a similar experience to the recent Tony Cragg exhibition (Please touch, Kunstpalast Düsseldorf), where the best thing was watching people interact with the sculptures, although the touching as such was fun too.

The room in the photo below, for instance, had lots of white walls to draw on and a white rowing boat in the middle, to leave messages on the theme of migration and refugees, with blue sharpies provided. Thankfully, the people willing to pay for a Yoko Ono exhibition appear to be a very sensible lot, so the quality of the contributions was a lot better than what you might find on other blank spaces. I also loved the multiple trophic layers of interactions: the artist, the participant, the participant's friend taking a photo, then me taking a photo of both:

own photo

More photos on my flickr.

not yet a capital

Back in the first plague winter of 2020-21, I entertained myself with a blog series on the "lost cities" where my recent ancestors used to live - until the 1960s when my parents and grandparents (separately) thought it was a good idea to live in the sticks and embrace a car-dependent lifestyle. The series was born out of research for my musical family history memoir when I realised that Heinrich the cellist and Frieda the pianist each lived in several cities that I quite liked, and never, ever, in the country (while old Heinrich was in the military, his regiment was moved to the small town of Dieuze as a punishment, that was as close as they got).

This focus on Heinrich and Frieda obviously biased my first set of 10 lost cities (to which I then appended one from the inlaws side), so I always thought I might one day continue with a few more. It only took me four years, but now I think I have another 9 or 10 at hand to carry on. I'll include Hamborn in the list as number 11 and continue counting so here comes Bonn as number 12.

I initially didn't include Bonn, because my grandparents only moved there to study, so it was kind of an ephemeral presence our family had there. Then again, they first met there, and they both studied in other universities before doing their final years at Bonn, so history could have turned out differently, and their separate decisions to come to Bonn were kind of crucial for my existence to happen. And come to think of it, that's pretty much the same level of importance as Strasbourg has, where Heinrich and Maria met a generation earlier. Although I don't recall anybody having a romantic attachment to Bonn, in contrast to the Strasbourg affinity that has been passed down several generations.

Bonn doesn't need much of an introduction, as it served as the federal capital of West Germany for some four decades. (It also happens to be twinned with Oxford.) Just to note that before the war it was mainly the home of a well-respected university, which had been set up in 1818 after Bonn became part of Prussia. Located on the main north-south axis along the river Rhine, it was much more convenient to reach by rail than many of the smaller historic university towns such as Göttingen or Marburg. In the 1930s, it had around 100,000 residents.

What happened was that Heinrich's son Richard, after studying two semesters in Göttingen and one in Vienna, arrived in Bonn in 1929. Ruth moved to Bonn in the summer of 1930, after studying in Freiburg, Münster, and Freiburg again. In choosing Bonn, both moved closer to their parents, based at Wuppertal and Rheydt, respectively. They took their exams in 1933 and 1934, respectively. They finished more quickly than planned as they feared the imminent removal of some of their profs who were Jewish, including the mathematician Felix Hausdorff and the chemist Heinrich Rheinboldt.

There are lots of photos of Richard and Ruth from their student days in Bonn, of which I have included a few in my "every picture" series (eg: Richard, Ruth), although they don't offer much of a sense of place. I'm not sure if their correspondence from the student days has survived - if so I haven't seen it yet - so I don't even know the addresses where they lived in Bonn. So, more or less randomly, I picked an old postcard of the market square, because it is still recognisable today:

source

And here is a view I really like of the Poststrasse:

source

After preparing this entry, I revisited Bonn and realised this view is just a few metres away from the main entrance of the main station Bonn Hbf, so this is basically what you see when you come out of the station and cross the road (or pass through the tunnel, choose exit "Poststrasse"). The cigar shop on the right was obviously destroyed and rebuilt in the same contour but without the decorative elements. It is now a Macdonalds. The building on the left appears to have survived (probably the reason why the same contour was rebuilt on the right, to keep the symmetry).

I also visited the Macke-Haus, where expressionist painter August Macke lived and worked until the first world war. Will rave about that separately.

Previously, I had visited the city a few times in the 2010s, as one of my children was studying there for a couple of years - back then the Macke Haus was closed for major refurbishment, but I did enjoy the Kunsthalle and the Arithmeum, two of the modern museums in the south of the city where the government quarters used to be.

Previously in the #lostcities series:

1. Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961
2. Strasbourg 1901 - 1908
3. Minden 1903 - 1952/ca.1970
4. Tangermünde 1888 - 1916
5. Rheydt 1923 - 1935
6. Königsberg 1935 - 1945
7. Aachen 1936 - 1940
8. Idar-Oberstein 1940 - 1962
9. Bad Nauheim 1945 - 1972/1983
10. Würzburg 1961 - 1968
11. Hamborn inlaws: 1922 - 1979/2015

NB I have now added a second end date to the cities where other family members stayed on after the direct ancestors died. So far, that is the case for Minden, Bad Nauheim and Hamborn.

blue riders on film

Some thoughts on

Münter & Kandinsky
Marcus O. Rosenmüller
Germany 2024

I didn't quite get my act together to catch the Münter & Kandinsky exhibition at the Tate Modern this summer, but I made up for it by watching the movie at Dusseldorf, and I also visited the Macke Haus at Bonn and revisited some of the Blue Rider works at the K20 at Dusseldorf this month. Earlier this year, I saw the Kandinsky and af Klint exhibition and read the book about the women of the Blue Rider, so all in all I feel I have my blue riders lined up reasonably well this year.

So, the film - a bit like the one about Hilde Coppi I saw a day earlier - is pegged to the female protagonist being troubled by Nazi officials, and then reflecting on the twists and turns of her life that brought her to this point. Unlike Coppi, Münter manages to outwit the Nazis in that her stash of Kandinsky paintings remains undiscovered when they raid her house. Looking back from that point, it's a pretty straight telling of the story of Münter's life from the time she signed up for Kandinsky's art course in Munich to the time he ghosted her as we would say now.

I've seen critics moaning that there is too much soap opera in this film and not enough art, but I was reasonably happy with the coverage of the art. The artsy angles of the locations, from the light-flooded landscapes to the hand-painted staircases, come out well, and I felt I did get to relate to Münter's creative process sufficiently. I was also excited to see that she appears to have taken lots of photos as well - will look out for those. Maybe the title is a bit of a misnomer, as Kandinsky spends much of the time withdrawing himself from her attentions, and accordingly we see less of him and also get less than perfect insight into his creative work (ironically, IMDB lists a Russian title for the movie which translates as "Kandinsky and his muse" managing to be both offensive and a misrepresentation of the film). Also, the other artists of the group, Marc, Macke, Klee, Jawlensky, Werefkin only drift by rather fleetingly. So to fix that, one could have reduced the time frame to the time when all of them were alive (until 1914) and the title characters were together. Or have separate biopics for the others. I would be really keen on one covering Macke and Klee's trip to Tunis - but that's obviously another story for another movie. But as a Münter biopic, and in terms of flying the flag for female artists wronged by the arts world, this film does the job.

IMDB

PS 25.11. Upon my return I read the review in epd-film - they object that the film does too much telling as opposed to showing, and that it is a lot more conventional than the work of the artists concerned. Which is of course true, but in a biopic, we just want the story of the relevant life or lives to be told. A piece of film art as revolutionary as the Blue Rider paintings were would be interesting but would not serve this purpose. I would also watch it though.

good news

It doesn't happen very often these days, but my latest feature has some very good news to report, so enjoy:

Prophylactic progress against AIDS

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 22, 18 November 2024, Pages R1109-R1111

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 .

Even 40 years after its discovery, HIV is still a major health problem across the global south. This transmission electron micrograph shows HIV-1 virus particles budding out of an infected H9 cell. (Photo: NIAID/Flickr (CC BY 2.0).)

cycling with cellos

Some thoughts on
Highway cello
by Kenneth Wilson
City Village Books 2023

This book found me because I am known for cycling around Oxford with a cello on my back, and this author cycled from Hadrian's Wall to Rome with a cello on the back of his bike, which he used for busking in various places along the way. I haven't done that yet, but yes we do seem to have a lot in common in the cycling and cello departments:

• Once upon a time I cycled a similar distance in a similar time (3500 km in 35 days), from Germany around five of the six sides of France's hexagon, and back into Germany, carrying camping equipment but no cello. In my defence, I was learning to play the double bass back then, and Heinrich, our family cello, hadn't been restored yet.
• Since ca. 2004, I have been cycling with cellos around Oxford on a regular basis, first carrying them for the young cellist in the family, and more recently for my own musical adventures. I reckon that those short journeys taken roughly once a week over 20 years must add up to a similar distance as Hadrian's Wall to Rome.
• I have played a very similar kind of repertoire on the cello, including obviously the easier ones of the Bach suites, as well as the Swan and some folk tunes such as Sally gardens. Haven't done busking as such but played some of that outdoors eg in Florence Park during the Plague years.
• I was travelling in France at the same time as he was, but sadly missed him. I went to Nimes and then to the Drome region (see my photos here), must have crossed his route travelling by train from Avignon to Strasbourg.

However, these aren't necessary qualifications for reading the book. As far as I can tell (despite being too close to the subject matter) it is a really charming travelogue and manages to convey aspects of cello and cycling cultures to a lay audience, with other bits like old churches thrown in as well. The author used to be a vicar before he lost his faith, so there are bits about religion and philosophy too. I am surprised that it is self published (with the publisher's name obviously made up for the occasion), as I would have thought that there are quite a few travel publishers out there that would have happily taken it on.

I was pleased to learn about things like warmshowers, crazyguyonabike, and the street performance festival at Chalon sur Saone, which happens annually in July (Chalon dans la rue). Although I had been aware of carbon fibre cellos, it was interesting to read the background story of how they were invented.

Given my parallel experience, there are bound to be things I disagree with. I would never put the cello directly on the bike. I like to think that using my soft body as a shock absorber, the instrument is quite safe on my back, and it's not nearly as heavy as it looks. I also like the fact that it makes me look like a giant on the bike, so hopefully drivers will stay clear of me. And the contraption the author used looks downright dangerous to me.

Also, being a lazy kind of person, I would have avoided all those mountains he's so keen on climbing. I would find myself a nice river and follow its course - there are suitable cycle paths along the Rhine and the Danube, for instance. I find it much more civilised to go with the flow than to sweat on the serpentines. On that note, if he had stayed with the river Saone beyond Chalon and then followed the Rhone, I might have seen him busking in Avignon. (Considering his interest in church history, he really should have gone via Avignon.) Too bad.

PS here's my little library of cello-related memoirs and biographies (listed alphabetically by the last name of the relevant cellist):

• Mercedes Cebrián: Cocido y violonchelo
• Jetta Marie Vasak: My bohemian heritage (about the family of Zdeňka Černý, portrayed as "the greatest Bohemian violoncellist" in a famous Mucha poster).
• Hilary and Piers DuPre: A genius in the family
• John Holt: Never too late
• Anita Lasker-Wallfisch: Inherit the truth / Die Wahrheit erben
• Gregor Piatigorsky: Cellist
• Eric Siblin: The cello suites: In search of a baroque masterpiece
• Kenneth Wilson: Highway cello

troubling history

Some thoughts on

In Liebe, Eure Hilde (From Hilde, with love)
Andreas Dresen; starring Liv Lisa Fries
Germany, 2024

As I'm a massive fan of Babylon Berlin and Charlotte Ritter as played by Liv Lisa Fries, I would have watched anything with Fries in a vaguely pre-1945 role, and was lucky to catch this new film in Germany a few weeks after its release.

In a sense the role of Hilde Coppi is not that far away from Charlotte Ritter, only a couple of years younger and also a secretary, so one could almost read this as a Babylon Berlin sequel in which a romantic summer is interspersed with a rather brutal awakening. Except that Babylon Berlin was fiction and this story is real. And very much underappreciated so far.

I think I had heard the term Rote Kapelle for this network of anti-Nazi resistance activists before, but that's about as far as my knowledge went. (Wikipedia translates it as "red orchestra," but note that a Kapelle is rather a small orchestra as you would employ for a dance event or as a marching band, emphatically not a symphony orchestra.) None of the names rang any bells. The simple explanation: The resistance people who were celebrated (to a degree and not by all) in (western) Germany were christian-conservative nationalists who wanted to save their fatherland from that evil spirit that was bound to drive it over a cliff. Many of the members of the Rote Kapelle, on the other hand, were communists. (Note, however, that the Nazis liked to brand resistance activists with this label to tarnish them as communists - in reality some may have become involved with other motivations, eg humanitarian.) Thus, even though I think many more of them perished than from the July 20 coup attempt or the White Rose student movement, their memory was all but wiped out in the west - but celebrated in the GDR.

The other thing that left me stirred and shaken is that the film's protagonist Hilde Coppi, born in May 1909, is exactly the same age as my paternal grandparents whom I knew well in their later lives. Like them, she saw her world fall apart in her mid twenties, when fascism took over - something I often think about as it's now happening again. Ruth and Richard managed to keep a low profile and survived with luck, whereas Hilde happened to get involved with those communists and shared their fate. With some change of makeup, the same actors could have played my grandparents (in a less eventful movie) - and conversely, with a different set of personal contacts, my grandparents could have ended up in the red orchestra. Very troubling stuff.

Focussing on Hilde Coppi is also a clever trick as it enables the storytelling to avoid the gruesome torture that must have been inflicted on other members of the Rote Kapelle. Due to her rather marginal role and the fact that she was pregnant when she was arrested, she didn't get the worst treatment, and we are left to imagine what may have happened to her husband and his friends.

And then, if you're not sufficiently stirred by the end, there is a special guest for you - Hilde's son, whose birth in prison we witnessed in some detail, speaks an afterword. Now 81, historian Hans Coppi Jr. doesn't specifically talk about the present resurgence of fascism, but we are left to imagine what he thinks of it.

No sign of a UK release date so far - but I guess with all the Nazi history in it, this one must have better chances then most other German films. Might add it to my films not shown list for now, just to be on the safe side.

a violin with a famous name

Pirate luthier adventures continued:

Jumping back to violin number 16),

which needed the fingerboard to be glued back on, and it took me a while to gather the courage for the whole hide glue business, but it worked quite well and hasn't fallen apart yet.

This violin, which I bought for £25, is branded Sebastian Klotz, but sadly not by the Mittenwald Luthier, but by Yamaha Malaysia, who appear to have trademarked his name, written as one word, as you see on the label:

The rather posh case (with a hygrometer - but maybe that's more common in Malaysia?) and the rosin are branded skv for Sebastian Klotz violins, I suppose. I hear the Klotz family are still building violins in Mittenwald, maybe they should send their lawyers.

Apart from the fingerboard and a bit of scraping on the bridge, there wasn't much to do on this one, but as I had the tailpin out, I wondered if I could take a photo through the hole, and that turned out quite nicely, so here's the view of the very solid looking skv soundpost.

First impressions: The violin sounds very much like the Stentor student models - good enough for folk but nothing special. I think it's just right for holiday practice so I've taken it to Dusseldorf where it will stay on top of my grandmother's old piano. As such it will stay in my collection so I'd better add the tag of my much neglected "all our instruments" series.

I've now exchanged the photos in my freegle ad for the one at the top of this entry, think people were getting bored with the ones I had for a year and a half, which showed violin 1) before and after restoration.

Previously in the pirate luthier series:

violin 1) is the one my late aunt had since the 1930s, which got me started. After restoring it in November 2022, I played it almost every day for 14 months, until number 5) showed up.

violin 2) is a Stentor student 1 (a very widely used brand of cheap fiddles available everywhere and still being produced). It has a fault that is probably not worth repairing, see the blog entry on number 3) below. After stripping it of some accessories and spares, I am now inclined to keep it in a semi-functional state to try out experimental repairs, i.e. use it as a wooden guinea pig of sorts.

violin 3) came from a folkie friend who moved away. I put the soundpost back in its place and it has now found a new home.

violin 4) is a modern Chinese one which I bought from one musical friend and sold to another, no work needed.

violin 5) (donated by a friendly freegler) is my new favourite and the one I currently play in folk sessions.

violin 6) is the half-sized Lark which was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 7) is a skylark from 1991 which I bought on gumtree for £ 10 and fitted with a new bridge. Good enough for folk I would say. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 8) is the "ladies violin", a 7/8 skylark. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 9) is the one which needed a new bridge and a tailgut and turned out to sound quite lovely on the E string. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 10) is the broken one with traces of multiple repair attempts. I'm still gathering courage to try and fix that one.

violin 11) is the 3/4 sold by JP Guivier & Co Ltd. in the 1950s but may actually be older than that. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 12) is a full-size Lark which a freegle user kindly donated and delivered after seeing my offer. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violins 13) through to 15) I bought locally through gumtree or facebook, nothing special to report.

violin 16) is the Sebastian Klotz branded one described above, sadly not made by the Mittenwald Luthier, but by Yamaha Malaysia, who appear to have trademarked his name.

violin 17) is the supersized violin with a very strong sound.

violin 18) is the slightly drunken but nice sounding violin from Poland.

violin 19) is a Stentor studend violin which only needed a little TLC, and within less than a week I had it brushed up and ready to move to our local school. The most intriguing problem it had was that somebody had put in the bridge the wrong way round, with the lower slope under the G string.

brown algae and blue carbon

There is another COP climate summit coming up this week, and to fend off the evil spirits of fossil fuel dependency I've written another climate related feature to appear just ahead of the event. So delegates have something to read when they get bored. This time it's about kelp both as a casualty and as a potential saviour in the climate catastrophe. I'm afraid the choice between these two paths rests very much with us (ie humanity). So judging on current performance in global affairs, not much hope there.

Anyhow, the feature is out now:

Brown algae and blue carbon

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 21, 4 November 2024, Pages R1059-R1061

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 .

Kelps can capture and sequester carbon on a scale that is significant for climate mitigation. (Photo: freddy an/Pixabay.)