Kafka's Hebrew notebook in the Israeli National Library
Before his death Franz Kafka gave his archive Max Brod who published The Trial and Metamorphosis despite Kafka’s request to burn all his unpublished work. Max Brod came to Israel and brought the archive with him. After his death Max Brod’s secretary Esther Hoffe took the ownership of the treasure. Allegedly there are never published novels but no one knows for sure as it was never cataloged. Esther Hoffe’s daughter Eva and Ruth living in Israel sold part of the archive to a German research institute. No one knows exactingly what they sold or what they still keep in Israel in their safe deposit boxes. BBC got the story.
Burning of the Jews during the Black Death, Liber Chronicarum, 1493
Two Jewish treasures discovered in Colmar, Alsace region of France in the 19th century and recently in 1990s in Erfurt (former Eastern Germany) are on display in London at the Wallace Collection. The exhibition will be on the permanent display in the Old Synagogue of Erfurt, one of the oldest synagogues in Europe. Both treasures were hidden during the flight from the towns by the Jewish families. Guardian has a video review of the exhibition. Amazing jewelry and memory.
The Erfurt wedding ring with a bell inside. Many photographs show just the crown of this ring while the most unusual detail are the two folded hands on the bottom of the ring. The tops of the widow decorations are slightly bent inwards so a beautiful bride wouldn’t scratch herself. The stars form what appears to be a three-dimensional Star of David. I feel it is possible to imagine and bring to life the bride that was wearing the ring, bring back her flowing robes and her fleeting dreams. Hes sense of doubt and her generous acceptance. The fragrance and the love.
The image above is part of the Nuremberg Chronicle.
A clip of Slavoj Zizek talking about the classic musical The Sound of Music. I need to see the film again but let me think about this for a moment. The film was a Broadway remake, I wonder if there was an evolution of the imagery. A classic carnival persona is Mikhail Bakhtin’s cultural mirror image. Here Zizek claims that the mirror image itself is just a metaphor, it’s a bit of a cheap shot. Because in reality Nazis were impersonating the Jews all along. Look, here is the basic Nazi idea – the Jews want to dominate the world, the are in control of the European politics, music, art, banking, culture, etc. So instead of denouncing the very idea of the cross border domination, the Nazis said that’s exactly what we Germans want to do. We want to forcibly cross-dress as the Jews and dominate all aspects of the European culture and there could not be two nations playing this role at the same time. You see how it becomes easy to reverse engineer Nazis into Jews even in the film. Except Zizek is not telling you that this was always the Nazi ethos to become the Jews and the bucolic agricultural nationalism versus the cosmopolitan industrial, rootless domination was the central stage of the horrible conflicts. And of course Hitler himself being an Austrian from a small beautiful village makes the role reversal complete. Check it out: ►►►read more
thejc.com – Palestinian attack on JC website. For the background of this event there is a somewhat long post by David: Treppenwitz – A week in (Egypt) England.
I have been thinking about the sweeping metaphors, like “Egypt”, etc. Douglas Rushkoff for example says the “dark ages” got a bad rap, but then he falls into the same trap by describing that ten centuries period as “good”. Lars Brownworth laments the historical clichés about the Byzantine millennium. The soundbite descriptions are not even true for the eight years, as in the “Bush decade”, let along centuries. So when you start a conversation with a sweeping and patently inaccurate metaphor your description trends towards the one-sided oversimplifications, hopelessly inadequate in portraying the complex, multidimensional and multistaged historical dramas.
We all know the precarious posture of the European Jewry, the Islamic expansion in Europe is a political hot potato, considered by many a threat to the entire European civilization. But it is astounding that David Bogner fails to mention that he lives in the west bank town armed and surrounded by a wall, travels to nearby capital in a bullet proof bus, and I believe David walks around with a gun. His town Efrat is precariously perched on the edge of the Palestinian annexation. And he still complains about the security in London? In fact the security detail in London is there to guard against the terrorist virus hatched within a mile from the David Bogner’s new home, the deadly virus now spread all over the western world.
Guardian – Police believe gang behind theft of Nazi slogan:
“A state of emergency was announced in Poland today involving tightened border controls and random police checks as a nationwide hunt was launched for the infamous bronze sign to the former German Nazi death camp Auschwitz after it was stolen.”
photo via flickr/glennaa
Vladimir Bukovsky, the former dissident, secretly copied and eventually published on the internet Soviet era Kremlin archive. There is a treasure trove of information that no one wants to touch. The archive can expose multiple politicians that did business with the communist Russia. Similar archive of the Gorbachev era have been copied electronically (not yet revealed, expect in bits and pieces) from the Gorbachev Foundation by Pavel Stroilov who was granted political asylum in Britain because of the archive.
Baroness Ashton was just appointed to the post of High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy in the new EU parliament, equivalent of the European Foreign Ministry. Watch Nigel Farage take Catherine Ashton to task in the EU parliament yesterday. This is a great theater. ►►►read more
The book Juedisches Ceremoniel is an illustrated description of Jewish religious ceremonies, rites of passage and feast days, which first appeared in 1716, and this second edition in Nürnberg, 1724. Plates engraved by J. G. Puschner. Annotations by Sebastian Jacob Jungendres. There entire book could be read at the Center for Jewish History collection. The images are published with the kind courtesy of The Leo Baeck Institute, via Center for Jewish History on Flickr.
Kosher Butchering
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This is a Tufte-like visualization of the history of British, Spanish, Portuguese and French empires from the 19th through 20th centuries. This work was done by Pedro M Cruz. ►►►read more
by Ben Atlas on 11.13.2009.10:39am · 1 comment
Zizek linked on Twitter to the article by Terry Eagleton about Walter Benjamin – Waking the dead. The required Obama segways are silly but some of the thoughts on Benjamin are interesting (I don’t understand why British left is so fanatically obsessed with Israel, it seems they can’t write a paragraph without the reference). Anyhow:
“In this way, Benjamin thought, we could redeem our ancestors after a fashion. The traditional Judaic rituals of mourning and remembrance could be lent a new twist. For this unorthodox leftist, astonishingly, there could even be something revolutionary about nostalgia. Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism. Our politicians speak of drawing a line under the past and turning our back on ancient quarrels. In this way, we can leap forward into a scrubbed, blank, amnesiac future.
If Benjamin rejected this kind of philistinism, it was because he was aware that the past holds vital resources for the renewal of the present. Those who wipe out the past are in danger of abolishing the future as well. Nobody was more intent on eradicating the past than the Nazis, who would, like the Stalinists, simply scrub from historical record whatever they found inconvenient. The past was as much clay in their hands as the future.True power is sovereignty over what has already happened, not just the capacity to determine what will happen next.
In one of his shrewdest sayings, Benjamin remarked that what drives men and women to revolt against injustice is not dreams of liberated grandchildren, but memories of enslaved ancestors. It is by turning our gaze to the horrors of the past, in the hope that we will not thereby be turned to stone, that we are impelled to move forward.
Benjamin was greatly interested in the work of a fellow Jew, Sigmund Freud, who also saw remembrance as the key to emancipation. In Freud’s view, human beings are naturally amnesiac animals. It is forgetfulness that keeps us going. We survive only by repressing a great deal of unpleasant material from our past. For Freud, it is oblivion that is natural to us. Remembering is just forgetting to forget. It can be an extraordinarily painful process, which is one reason why we tend to avoid it.”
I dont know if Terry Eagleton is stealing from me but this is what I said virtually verbatim - Reinventing the Past with Sigmund Freud. But instead of redeeming the past people live with an utopian view of personal and national history. People aspire to be as good as the past generation which is a deliberate lie. They then project another utopia into the future. This deprives the past suffering of redemption and meaning and justifies the present evil by the future utopian dividend. The only moral stand is to be sober and truthful about the past and give meaning to the past by our actions in the now! Incidentally this was the life’s motto and the direction of the work by Gershom Sholem who was the closest friend of Walter Benjamin.
The Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands published some of it’s vast collection on Flickr. I would like to curate poignant and interesting World War I photos, the ultimate “black swan” event. How about this crazy photo, the contrast of armor and a white pigeon, the expectation of a far away contact.
British Tank, Western Front in France. Tanks kept in touch with the Infantry by carrier pigeons which were released and carried messages back.
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Previously unpublished photos have been revealed by 