food for the Russian winter

last aft here in library...
food gathered for the winter in Weimar's Anna Amalia Study Centre...

on Spinoza, Herder, Goethe, Fr. Schlegel, Geschichte des Bildungsbegriffs, Rezeptionsgeschichte der Bibel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hesse, et al.
  

Goethe, Schleiermacher, Milton

"And when Friedrich [Schlegel] lent him his presentation copy of Schleiermacher's Discourses he read the first two or three with eager admiration of their breadth of culture, but 'the more negligent the style became, and the more Christian the religion, the more this effect changed into its opposite, and finally the whole thing ended in wholesome and cheerful antipathy'. During the summer [1799] he had read Milton's Paradise Lost in the Weimar Park, perhaps seeking guidance for his own attempt in Faust to turn Christian theology to poetic effect, but, though he conceived a considerable respect for Milton, the subject of his epic, for all its advantages of an easy appeal to the faithful, remained in his view 'worm-eaten and hollow within'....If Milton could not help him, Schleiermacher certainly could not either."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Nicolas Boyle, 2000, p. 643.
  

moonshine on the Ilm, 1799

"For a week the author of 'To the Moon' rose in the middle of the night and from the silent meadows of the Ilm observed that 'so significant object' through a seven-foot telescope made by a local craftsman. 'There was a time when people wanted the emotion of the moon, now they want the sight of it', he later said to Schiller, who acutely remarked on the uncanny tangibility in the telescope of an image that otherwise seemed purely and unapproachably visual. The mystery of Nature only receded, however, it did not vanish."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Nicolas Boyle, 2000, p. 641.
  

there are two kinds of people in the world...

those who want stimulants...
and those who prefer tranquilizers!
  

Goethe felt "wakened from a dream"

"But this belief in the journal [Propylaea] as the organ of men of taste throughout the German-speaking world was deeply shaken by the news which Cotta sent Goethe at the end of June [1799]: sales in the first year were no more than 450 an issue, barely enough to cover Goethe's fee, and Cotta had so far lost nearly 2,000 dollars on the venture. Goethe, desperately disappointed, felt 'wakened from a dream'."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Nicolas Boyle, 2000, p. 634.
 

the business of philosophy

though it would be bad for the industry, if what now, and for an arguable time period in history, calls itself "philosophy", was taught less in abstracto ; ), and the systems of most philosophers were taught realistically in the living biography of  the philosophers... it would be less of a dead end.
 

3am, Weimar

restless...
weather change?
sky cleared. moon, stars...quiet streets.

the popular grass between Schlossturm and Anna Amalia
mist. shifting. cool.
silent, but then...

what is that driver doing at this time of night?
on bikes, now and again, students heading home after sex?

is there anyOne attending?

40 years since beginning...
again, wondering -- as in Tuscaloosa, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, as in Bonny Doon, as in Dornach, as in Highbury Fields,... -- will this change...and how

or those times are passed?
  

a Steppenwolf's weather

after two weeks of fine summer weather here in Thuringia -- "You are lucky!" ("Sie haben Glück gehabt.") -- this afternoon's dark clouds, rain, lightning and thunder feel -- aside from insights reading -- more consoling than since arrival.
  

distraction in Frankfurt am Main, 1797

Frankfurt am Main, 9 August 1797
Goethe to Schiller
"...the public in a great city*...lives in a constant whirl of getting and spending, and what we call mood ["Stimmung"] can be neither produced nor communicated. All entertainments, even the theatre, are there only to provide distraction and the great inclination of the reading public for magazines and novels arises because the former always, and the latter usually furnish a distraction from distraction.... I even think I have noticed a kind of distaste for poetical productions, at least in so far as they are poetical, which on these grounds seems quite natural. Poetry requires, indeed commands concentration, it isolates a person against their will...".

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Nicolas Boyle, 2000, p. 543.
 
* Frankfurt in 1800 had ca. 35,000 inhabitants.

jogging along the Ilm in Weimar...

...was certainly not done in its Classical period.
can one imagine Frau von Stein or Duchess Luise out for a jog?
  

career-killer tattoos?

a surprising number and variety of large-size tattoos on both many men and women in this area of Germany.

tastes differ?
...ugly!

and, presumably, career killers?

(A socio/psychological study might be done of the social-, regional-, class-,etc -origins, education, group-affiliations, etc of those who "wear" which tattoos where and why!)
  

Goethe and societal leaders

"Niemand als wer sich ganz verläugnet ist werth zu herrschen, und kan herrschen."
(13 May 1780, Tagebücher)
-- War in Goethe's Writings, Edward T. Larkin, 1992, p. 18.
 

the "Nietzsche-Archive" is not...

...the archive of Nietzsche's materials since ca. 1956.

an audio-tour of the building is more about the interior designer Henry van de Velde and Nietzsche's dubious and duplicitous  sister, Elizabeth.

the upstairs room where Nietzsche died can not be visited.
  

the lingering scent of an inexcusable fire

the scent of the 2 September 2004 fire in the "Rococo Hall" of the Anna Amalia Bibliothek can still be discerned in the first moments on entering...



the realistic 1831 bust of Goethe (ca. age 80) by Frenchman P. J. David d'Angers, conveyed the most lasting impression of those times (especially compared to all of the idealized, 'noble-Greek-style' busts of Goethe, et al common in those times which also occupy the Rococo Hall).


  

the too blatant world romanticized

standing, watching, in fully hopeless expectation alone beside the darkening, silent, western path along the Ilm, not far north of the Nature Bridge...

realizing that it is the sun's light reflected, twice, from the moving surface of the slowly flowing Ilm...
and the moon merely reflecting the distant sun's light on to the gravel path, and on and into the nearby woods...

in the twilight of the delightful, cool, July evening..."Goethe's Garden House", distant, gray, intrigued...

the too blatant world romanticized by the dark and shadows
  

Bildung sub specie nihilis?

even if Moses on his mountain was mad...
and Nietzsche's "madman" in the market was not...
Bildung sub specie aeternitatis
  

the unconscious story: Vermutungsgeschichte

Needed: A history of unconscious assumptions.
  

a discovery in the Anna Amalia collection, Weimar

of all that read, seen, visited, observed in Weimar and surround...that clearly-written 1934 dissertation about the change of "Bildung" from its religious origin, usage and meaning to its humanitarian-philosophical, is surely, and will surely remain, the most valuable and lasting, unexpected, "discovery" of this period of study, travel, observation.
 

an indulgence for lies?

what hath god wrought?...

almost 500 years after Luther protested the sale of indulgences...recent news is of the current Pope continuing the tradition of indulgences (if not, it seems, for a song, then apparently for a tweet)...

and, no matter how it is worded in all the very many different booklets, flyers, leaflets, announcements,...in several languages, "the house in which Luther died" is, admittedly(!), 'the house in which Luther did not die".
  

New Age... without the "death of God"

and another problem with "New Age spirituality" (in so far as it is not in the main just a latter-day version of what was historically critiqued as "enthusiasm", Schwarmerei and/or "New Thought") is its symptomatic and telling ignorance for all related to (to deliberately encompass much with the expression) "the death of God" in Western history.
  

the idea of Luther in the Wartburg

so...having now seen the birth-house where Luther was not born, and the death-house where he did not die...today it was the room where he was for some 10 months (May 1521 to March 1522) in hiding, incognito, as "Knight George"...and in such conditions it seems that all agree that he unquestionably actually lived and worked in those two rooms of the Wartburg, where he translated the New Testament into German.

and yet...
acknowledgedly, nothing now ín the visitable room -- its desk, chair, stove, cabinet, bible -- is in fact Luthers..."except", the student-looking attendant said confidently, "the whale vertebra" (a foot rest?), which seems doubtful nonetheless.
hearing that the room is otherwise as it was in his time...meaning presumably the large supporting structural timbers above and in the wall, and the wooden wall boards (such modern nails they had in those times)...
here an example pic of what is there to see


but, more seriously...
what is it in fact: though one perhaps wants to feel, to find, to see more than remains, it is -- like that which one feels, finds and sees is missing at eg the Golgotha stone... what is it all in fact but an idea. rather, a story. Luther's story, and its part of our larger history. those who dont know, nor wish to, the details of the history, can look at the "furnishings". but otherwise, what can one gain, what might one, from what happened there almost 500 years ago?
it is the idea, the understanding of the story, rather than the building, the room, the -- however dramatic -- location. it is the New Testament he translated there, the story of the conditions in which he did it, that remains...that resonates.

the room may as well be empty, except for those who need the simple "image" that it was so when Luther was there, perhaps to imagine they are his things. for others, it is the part of the story that happened there, however unconvincing Luther's Wartburg rooms may now be.

  

William James and Friedrich Schiller

William James' "moral equivalent of war" -- whatever historical contacts there may or may not have been -- is kin to Schiller's ideas of aesthetic development. (cf. Schiller's "politische Glaubenbekenntnis")
  

Jerusalem's Golgotha and Weimar's Goethe-Haus...

...can both be recognized as locations of contrasting "peaks" of humanity, of and in history...
with deeply differing ideas of man, world, nature, life, and God.

yet both locations are in historical fact at most replicas of what their realities actually were; and are. both were destroyed over time: Golgotha several times; Goethe's house on Frauenplan was gutted by aerial bombardment just weeks before the end of WWII.

and still another lesson to learn about history and humanity at these special historic locations is how few of the thousands of pilgrims and tourists inquire even enough to learn that what they are seeing is rather what they are believing than the historical realities of either place.
comforting human, historical deceptions.
  

the real replicas in "Lutherstadt" Eisleben

even seeing something that isnt there is sometimes useful...

interesting to visit the small town of Eisleben, which came to be known after 1946 (in German natürlich) as "Luther-town" Eisleben, where one may visit the historical birth-home in which the undoubtedly historic Martin Luther was not born, and also visit the death home in which he did not die.

the newly-opened (February 2013) museum of "Martin Luther's Death House" -- the historically-mistaken one in which he did not actually die on 18 February 1546 -- is a curious interactive museum (directed mainly at the younger generation, and done in a way that makes its theme of death seem almost fun) which while it is somewhat "religious, Christian" in its exposition and messages, yet is also rather wry in how it addresses the fact that it is Luther's death house museum where he did not in fact die. (the history of the wrong house becomes in part its own story.)

but, much like the pleasant yet false "old" realities in Weimar, Frankfurt, et al, it doesnt seem to matter too much -- especially for those who dont inquire enough to know -- that the birth and death homes of Martin Luther are at best replicas, and in the case of the "death home", rather more a replica of a replica.
  

Schulpforta mirroring history

worth a visit...perhaps best on a cloudy (holi)day...

even its name shows changes during its history, and interesting to consider the instability of history as reflected in even only its story in the 20th century...a bourgeois gymnasium, became a National Socialist school (ca. 1935-45), but was then unable to return to what it was before, becoming a socialist school, until the dissolution of the GDR in 1990, so that now it is maintained by the German state Saxony-Anhalt...
  

Renunciation in Nietzsche Haus Naumburg

in the entrance hall of the Nietzsche home in Naumburg one can read on the wall a rather rare, frank, honest statement which can regrettably not be said of many such "historical" houses in the world...

when preparing for the opening of this otherwise previously neglected house, from the 1991 purchase to opening in 1994, it would admittedly have been possible to gather period pieces to furnish the rooms as they might have been in the time of Nietzsche's youth and/or mental incapacity.
but, as it is written in the last sentence, a decision was taken to be honest about his things 'that had been lost forever'.
  

early couch potatoes, late 1700s German-speaking Europe

"Die Mensch is über das Dasein der Pflanze hinausgeschritten und sind nur 'niedrige Menschen, die gern in den Zustand der Pflanze zurückkehren möchten. Sie haben natürlich auch das Schicksal der Pflanzen; alle edlern Triebe, die Muskeln-, Empfindungs-, Geistes- und Willenskraft ermattet; sie leben ein Pflanzenleben und sterben frühzeitigen Pflanzentodes'."

-- citation from Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784-91 (4 Teile), in Die religiöse und die humanitätsphilosophische Bildungsidee und die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsromans im 18. Jahrhundert, 1934, Ernst Ludwig Stahl, p. 36.
 

die Bildung eines Schmetterlings

"Das Ideal dieses Bildungsgedankens ist die Koexistenz einer möglichst grossen Anzahl in ihrer eigentümlichen Totalität gebildeter Menschen. Das ist der Zweck menschlichen Lebens. Es ist kein vergeblicher, denn die einmal gebildete Gestalt geht nicht verloren, auch nicht im Tode. Die Grundkraft, aus der die ganze Bildung entspringt, ist eine unsterbliche, sie setzt daher ihr Werk in alle Unendlichkeit fort. Das Dasein nach dem Tode ist eine Fortsetzung des in der Welt begonnenen Lebens, im Grunde ist es ein höherer Ebene stattfindendes Leben der Bildung. Gleichnis dafür ist da Leben der Raupe, die sich in todähnlichen Schlaf einspinnt, und in schönerer Form als Schmetterling erwacht."

-- Die religiöse und die humanitätsphilosophische Bildungsidee und die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsromans im 18. Jahrhundert, 1934, Ernst Ludwig Stahl, p. 28-29.
  

"Exstirpation des deutschen [Drittes] Reiche zugunsten..."

in a timely manner in 1871 Nietzsche wrote of the "Exstirpation des deutschen Geistes zugunsten des deutschen [Zweite] Reiches". (Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, Erstes Stück, Kapitel 1)
now freely able to study Goethe, Nietzsche, et al in the rebuilt 1945 bombed-out Yellow Palace (now the Study Center of the Anna Amalia Bibliothek), one can say that "the Allies" participated in the "Exstirpation des deutschen [Drittes] Reiche zugunsten des deutschen Geistes ".
  

bad old news in Weimar, 1945

few tourists coming here will (want to) find their way to photos of Weimar after Februar 9 and 27 and March 10, 1945.
disheartening.
disenchanting as well.

for instance, the "Yellow Palace" as the photo shows below, survived in part, but this computer and desk, indeed this entire floor and this entire building´s interior, were empty space above rubble after the bombing.
 

 

and Goethe´s home on Frauenplan -- though not the 4-6 foot pile of mere rubble of his home in Frankfurt -- was severely damaged.

 

 

1934 gold in the Anna Amalia Bibliothek

Die religiöse und die humanitätsphilosophische Bildungsidee und die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsromans im 18. Jahrhundert
  

the real Goethe?

"In social terms, we could say he was confident there was in him an independent Goethe living like his father on his independent capital, but this bourgeois self was not identifiable with any of its manifestations as courtier and salaried official of an absolute ruler -- or as spokesman of the sentimental and highly philosophical culture which took place, among the subervient German middle classes, of the realistic, novel-centered literature then growing in shopkeeping England."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Nicolas Boyle, 2000, p. 310.
 

psychologies ≧ history

rather than live in our history, most live in their personal psychologies
  

?s?

what kind of questions can a person ask and answer with their life
  

Hellacious Joy, Goethe, 1773

"...es wäre keine Freude, eine Christ zu seyn, wenn nicht alle Heiden ewig gebraten würden."
1773, Brief des Pastors zu***...
  

Weimar ist überschöne!

difficult to imagine that seeing the sights here can be but superficial, if one does not come with insights.

the pleasant village become town certainly did not appear as it does now in Goethe´s  time, though that would hurt the necessary tourist income to make too clear.

however, the fact that Weimar (and many of its, eventually, historical buildings), as much of Germany, wa,s in a war for political world power, bombed with high-explosives from airplanes high above the clouds, must at least be recalled if any thing close to a realistic sense of Weimar then and now is to be had.
  

Tintern Abbey and Strausbourg Cathedral

Goethe´s changing relation to the Strasbourg Cathedral need be compared to that of Wordsworth´s and Tintern Abbey
 

divine discontent vs earthly content

observing daily life in Munich and southern Germany...the "death of God" seems to be an old, forgotten problem. passé.
little or no divine discontent...an earthly content
 

outsights or insights in Weimar?

even viewing all the sights and events in Weimar, these (out)sights will be less than studied insights
 

Public conscience at Nuremberg?

the essential "civilizational" symbols in Court Room 600 in the Palace of Justice over the door to the left side of the defendents of the 1945-46 Nuremberg Trials: the Medusa, Adam and Eve by the Tree, Germanic and Roman Law...
and over the interpreters: the scales of justice over the 10 Commandments.

...‘dictates of the public conscience and general principles of law recognized by the community of nations’...
as needed and understandable as this was, conscience can only with difficulty be other than personal.
 

"The Town of Hesse" today?

studying the faces...it seems quite unlikely that Hesse would feel any more at home in Calw, ´The Town of Hermann Hesse´, today, or that he and his views would be any more welcome, than when he lived there.
 

inner vs outer law: Germany vs Russia

whereas law, order and mores are internalized in Germany, in Russia they are hardly yet externalized