berlin 1945 and paris 1960 – two times a treason

hi ghazal,
i recalled today you once told me about your parents divorce, and you call your father a traitor, since he started an affair with another woman already 4 years after he married your mom. your judgement was clear-cut, since your dads love-affair in your eyes was first of all a decision against his children. i still dont see it as a treason, as something to condemn.

there are cases, real or fictious, which are more dramatic, and deserve the name TREASON much more.
Paris 1960 (À bout de souffle by Jean-Luc Godard) The little gangster Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) tries to seduce the American Student Patricia (Jean Seberg). She likes how he flirts with her, how he carresses her, but still she remains undecided about living with him.
finally she reports him to the police, who is desperately after Michel in a murder case. when the police wants to arrest him he tries to escape, and is shot dead by the officer. in the last seconds, Michel is laying in the middle of the street, dying, he looks up to Patricia and his last words roll over his dust covered lips “you are really a scumbag” (original: C’est vraiment dégueulasse). here we very much understand Patricias treason, although some scenes earlier she already announced to Michel that she considers reporting him to police – only to find out whether or not she loves him.

Berlin 1945 (Blind hero: the love of Otto Weidt). Otto Weidt was running a factory for brushes and kitchen brooms in nazi Germany. Blind himself, he mainly employs jews who – without his protection -would face deportation to concentration camps and death. He risks his own existence, and several times cheats with gestapo officiers to hide his workers from regular rides that take place. Otto Weidt is with no doubt a soul mate of Oskar Schindler. Weidts secretary and assistent in his anti-nazi conspirancy is the young and vivid Alice Licht, intelligent, clever, and enchanting, from an established jewish family. The two fall in love with each other, and one can see that it is mainly Alice who tries to seduce her boss who is 27 years her senior.

When the threat by Gestapo searches become worse and worse, Weidt hides entire families of his jewish employees in clandestine shelter rooms in the rear part of the factory. In 1944, though, Alices parents are discovered by a night Gestapo inspection and deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto, where they soon die. Alice is also caught and transported to the Auschwitz camp. Otto Weidt, receiving a last postcard from her with a decrypted description of where she is, travels to the notorius Auschwitz site and there requests entry pretending that he wants to offer the SS a special deal to purchase his brushes. But the SS guards refuse him entry to the Auschwitz camp. Soon after, when the Soviet army advances at the Eastern front, the concentration camp is liberated and Alice and Otto reunite in a small town nearby. Alice, traumatized by learning about the whole extend of the holocaust and realizing that her parents are the among the 6 million victims of it, decides to leave Germany for the US. Otto can not follow her right away, but feels that the love affairs they once had was not least ignited by the external political danger of the holocaust, directly imposing a death risk onto Alice and the other Jews of the factory and making Otto Weidt their only saivor. When the nazi threat is over, Alice forgets what she once begged Otto for: to stay with her forever. Left behind in Berlin alone, with no chance to get a visa for the US, and not hearing from Alice any more, Otto Weidt dies in 1947. I assume with the cause of death “broken heart”. After a few years Alice Licht moves to Israel. It is not her, but other Jews of the Berlin brushes factory who were rescued by Otto Weidts braveness and initiated him being awarded the title of a Righteous among the Peoples in Jad Vashem.
The treason by Alice Licht is something I will never understand.

Rock on, Jimmy Page

Jimmy Page, a living legend of rock guitar style and founder of Led Zeppelin celebrates his 70th birthday today. Wondering how it all began, with a young, shy school boy in a south London suburb, and his dream to play skiffle against his mothers advice, and to start a career in biomedical research to help fighting cancer ? Well, below there are some of his early musical performances at a BBC show that looks like the predecessor of Britain has got talent.

Jimmy Page (left side, on the guitar) playing in a skiffle band and talking to a BBC show master.

I am wondering if the polite interviewer from the BBC, who at this occasion was perhaps convinced that his didactic questions would bring young Jimmys on a right path of middle class academic career, ever remembered this day when in 1973 Jimmy did this:

Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin playing Stairway to Haven 25 years later.

Googles Literature Style

Good literature is not just about great ideas, good stories, dramatic situations interlaced with well developed thoughts and reflections. Literature is also about a writer-specific form, the specific style of how to say things. And this is what makes writers so unique and recognizable. You quickly can tell if a text which deals with a train ride through south-eastern Europe is by Thomas Pynchon, or Agatha Christie or Joseph Roth. Similarily, despite many novels and short stories are located in San Francisco, you will quickly recognise which one is a Raymond Chandler, because of his special style of writing: sober, precise, and very illustrative, with a certain distance to his characters, and by leaving any judgement to the reader.
Bad literature can be easily identified by the absence of style, or by the adoption of a very uniform style. A bad example are the Scandinavian crime stories which saw an inflation on the book discounts and the best seller lists. I guess they all follow the blood trace of the ordinary readers appetite for explicit described cruelity, for their suspicion that behind a seemingly harmonic society must be the worst degree of murder and slaughter-house sensation, and that after 5 p.m. every office clerk turns into a zombie or a werwolf, hunting for young flesh. Most of these crime novels also fuel the stereotype that moral values in the society are maintained only by a small, usually female minority.

If I open a book of this genre, I don’t recognise a style difference, whether its is by Adler Olsen, Stig Larsson, Henning Mankell or others of this school. Their style is simply indistinguishable, and therefore no style at all. The form is like Ikea, for a quick and cheap consumption to fill some empty time with some easy to get sensation.

There is, thanks god, much better literature coming from Ikea land, and one of the finest examples is Lars Gustafsson. He is not only a brilliant narrator, a great magician of merging reality, utopia, and philosophic reflections, but in addition he is a great stylist. After reading one of his novels, whether the plot is situated in Swedens Västmanland county, or in an Italian castle, or in a Berlin villa or a students dorm in Austin/Texas, you have the good chance to recognise any other of Gustafssons euvre. And this not because any names of the acting characters re-appear in the next book, a cheap trick used by the notorius Swedish crime writers in a helpless attempt to make their mass-production sequel books recognisable, by telling us again and again about the adventures of Wallander or Lisbeth Salander.

Lars Gustafsson does not need such a cheap trick to make his literature unique and recognisable. And how resilient Gustafssons style is I recognised only recently, when in complete ignorance of his Swedish mother tongue dared to translate two unpublished texts, assuming they were of his authorship, by using Googles translate function. The first text I received by e-mail, signed by Mr. Gustafsson personaly and carrying his e-mail address, one that my mail program properperly recognised because we had exchanged some correspondence before. What surprised me was that suddenly Gustafsson wrote to me in Swedish, maybe he wanted to challenge my promise from some years ago to learn the language in order to read his next books before they are translated by the publisher. But of course, I did not made much progress, and instead I quickly copy/pasted the whole message into Google Translate, and within a second or two, I could read a cry for help, explaining that Lars Gustafsson got pickpocket in London and without any cash or credit card left, has to sleep rough for the next night unless he can buy a ticket home, for which he asks me for some financial support. At this moment, I did not paid too much attention to the writing style of the message, first assuming that even a great literature stylist as Lars Gustafsson might not use his full talent at each and every short communication, and secondly, at least at this stage, I did not trusted a computer generated text translation to preserve a writing style. But this notion I had to revise short after. But what confused me a bit was that I received this emergency e-mail, supposedly from Lars Gustafsson, right at a weekend when Munich was hosting a three-days series of Skandinavian literature and poetry, with Mr. Gustafsson beeing scheduled to read from his books and poems on the first and the last day. When I called the organizers to investigate how Mr. Gustafsson could quickly be brought to Munich, to my surpise they could ensure me that he has already arrived in town some days ago, on a regular flight from Stockholm. So apparently, he never had been pick-pocketed in London, and the emergency mail was a fake one produced by some internet criminals to raise money from people they identified after hacking Mr. Gustafssons address list.

The week after hearing him reading some of his poems and essays in Munich, I had a look at his internet blog, curious to see if he already wrote something about his visit to Munich and this fictious London crime with him as the robbed victim. Everything new I found there was a text by Mr. Gustafsson recalling a former visit to Portugal. The few words I could decipher from the Swedish text were “globalisation”, “tourism”, “Fernando Pessoa” and “Baixa Alta”. To get at least some ideas what Lars Gustafssons relation to Portugal are, I again used Google to translate his blog post from Swedish to German. And within some milliseconds, I was reading a typical Gustafsson essay, in this incoparable style of linking some marginal observations of a daily life with deep philosophical reflections, sentences void of any didactic selfsufficiency, but entertaining and inspiring for the reader.  And this very unique, recognisable style made it almost undamaged through a computerized transformation, so that the text finally was not much worse than one translated by a professional translator of the publisher.

It is hard to tell, of course, if Google is realy so sophisticated that it can adequately translate any personal text to other languages and maintain the personal flavor, or if it is mainly the powerful style of Mr. Gustafssons language that makes his text so resilient to a computerized conversion. In this case, for sure, I could clearly tell which text was a real Gustafsson, and which one was a fake using his stolen e-mail address.

In maybe not too far a future there will be a new Google program, not to translate texts from one language to another, but from one style to another. So one could than take a text from an instruction manual and convert it into a Lars Gustafsson style instruction manual. Would this be an adequate essay, fiction or non-fiction ? For sure not, because style without ideas is still no literature, not a penny better than all the cheap best seller with their action-plots so hastily cobbled together.  Good literature needs both, clear, crisp ideas to develop, wrapped into a great style. And Lars Gustafsson is one of the few modern authors who is a master of this skill, and there is no Google program in sight to replace this talent.

The art of shoe-shining

Dear Ghazal,

Here is something to add to your hit list of Munich events: For all intellectuals looking for some extra skills: Take a one day seminar in professional shoe shining in the Munich Institute for Professional Leather Care (the nice color match of the photo with my blog lay-out is as always purely accidental).

20131019_180327

LaSt ThOuGhT


After watching the marvellous New Years Eve party at Russian TV I came to the conclusion that:

A Woman can reach any height in life if she is carried on a strong mans arms.

Secret Life

When we moved to England in 1992, we quickly realized that the British Islands are very distinct in terms of their nature. Nowhere else we have seen before trees full of blossoms in early January. At least till today I was convinced that this must have to do with the rather mild winter in the southern counties of the UK, like Kent, Sussex or Surrey, where we lived. Today I found the exact same tree on a cemetry in Munich, and became interested in its history and how it became so resistant to cold weather.

Bodnant viburnum, on Daglfing cementry, December 28th 2013

The name of this tree is Bodnant viburnum (Duft-Schneeball in German), and it is actually a product of man made plant breeding. The cross of Viburnum farreri (formerly V. fragrans) and V. grandiflorum was originally made by Charles Lamont, the Assistant Curator at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh in 1933, and I guess this is the reason why it became first popular in gardens and parks in Brittan, and only later was imported to other European countries.

So this tree is unique for showing its real beauty only in winter time, when (at least in Germany) most other plants lost their leaves and look pretty sad. I don’t really know why all around the world people warship so much the Christmas tree. I think they are pretty boring, and except for their wood have no use at all. Their needles are a pest once you have them on your carpet, and if you have them in your garden, they poison all other plants (by producing humic acid). Their roots destroy the foundations of buildings, inhibit the growth of grass and promote growth of moss. If you have some spruce or fir in your garden, you can be sure that after a while the garden looks like a dark forest. we have three of them in our garden, and I plan to cut them all this year to heat our oven with their wood. But even for heating, they are no good choice, since their resin causes a lot of soot which contaminates the chimney.

I would therefore opt to replace the fir (christmas tree) as symbol of life in hard winter times with Bodnant viburnum. It is an elegant and beautiful three, and it permits the few rays of winter sun to reach us, whereas pines and firs are like black spots which block the sun.

By the way, there are other plant species which resist the winter cold. I also like a lot the winter-hard cereals like rhy or barley, which look freshly green even at the strongest frost.

Winter rhy, near Munich-Daglfing, December 2013

When I saw these tiny young shouts now in December, I was happy to know that next year we will have again fields full of golden rhy with its tentalizing odor in summer.

An Oxford Accident

Hi Michael,

now that I received my licentiate degree, and the days got very short in Sweden at the Yalda feast, I am frequently again spending the evenings in my moms home, watching movies. We use to select movies in alternating order, one day it’s me bringing a rather novel film, another day mom suggests one that she knows from her youth.
Yesterday she brought one that was quite popular when she was student, in the wild 70s. The title is Accident, and it is a quite complex story of students and teachers at an Oxford college. The main character, Stephen is an introvert philosophy professor contentedly married to Rosalind, but fearing emotional stultification he yearns for an affair with the enigmatic Anna, played by Jacqueline Sassard. In a typical midlife crisis situation he realises that this could either revitalise or ruin his life. Simultaneously, he is locked in a battle of duelling egos with his student William, whose youthful vitality he envies, and with his friend Charley, whose media prowess and sexual success he covets. The story probes a conflict between intellect and emotion, where an educated elite, who should at least know their own minds, seem incapable of understanding or controlling their inner passions. It is a study of materially comfortable but morally bankrupt people on an emotional collision course, culminating in an accident that will haunt the hero for the rest of his life (as its recollection at the end of the film implies).

Joseph Losey, the director and Harold Pinter, who wrote the screenplay, are graphically and beautifully detailing the things about England they loves — or, at least, those things about Oxford that they find delightful and serene.

You have the look out of the college study window of a gentle philosophy don into the courtyard below, where the green grass is kept neatly trimmed by a placid goat. You watch the main characters punting on the river, with its lazy ripples and its stately swans and see them playing tennis and cricket, lolling through a misty afternoon.

Or, going out into the country, where the don who is his moody hero lives in a pleasant house with a wife and kiddies, the director loves to show everything. He loves the way the light falls in the morning on the wide-board, deep-grained floors. He loves the distant sounds of train whistles and the drone of jets high in the sky above the open fields. He makes everything look so mellow and lovely with his color cameras and his way of dwelling idly upon them that you’d think there’d be no fly in the ointment of this most gracious English world.

But there is a fly in the ointment—a very small one—that has been put there by the screenplay’s writer, Harold Pinter.  It has to do with the dons vagrant longing for the beautiful Austrian student Anna, to whom he is officially the tutor, but as soon as he learns that she has been the mistress of another don, feels deeply cut.

The fact that this other don is not only one of his oldest friends, but is also an aggravating rival because of his playboy allures and success as TV commentator, doesn’t help matters any. Furthermore, our fellow feels he’s getting old.

All this is moodily remembered by our hero, whom Dirk Bogarde plays, in a night just after a terrible automobile accident has happened outside his door. The girl he desires, who was driving, is safe but her companion has been killed, and this companion was another of the don’s students—a young aristocrat to whom the girl was engaged.

Does that sound a little complicated? Well, it isn’t—and it is. It isn’t because, actually, the story that Mr. Pinter and Mr. Losey have to tell is simply a frail exploration of the wistfulness and loneliness of this don. It is a conventional study of the minor anxieties of a man who has everything to make him happy, and yet he isn’t. He is sad.

But it is complicated from the viewpoint of the person watching the film, because no clues whatsoever are given to the nature of the girl. She is beautiful and quietly mysterious as played by Jacqueline Sassard, but we have no indication of why she so lightly switches men. Her function in the picture is to set up an amoral mystery and serve as an unattainable object of desire for our sad-eyed don.

What we discovered when talking with my mom about the different characters and how they developed during the plot of the movie was the discrepancy between hidden emotions and verbal communication. From the very beginning you could guess that both Anna, the student, and Stephen, the teacher have the most deep feelings for each other, but none of them speaks out. They not only hide these feelings from the other acting person (the colleagues and friends), but from each other as well. You can only tell from a particular view in their eyes and from the sound of their vioces, when they talk trivia. One scene shows this pretty clearly: During a lazy garden picknick, Anna is laying in the sun, when William, her “official” partner asks to join him for a walk. She refuses, saying she’d prefer to stay there on the sunchair, so William goes for a walk alone. After a minute she tells Steven how much she likes this afternoon in the garden. He nods, and almost casually replies that he is about to go for a walk. And suddenly, merely 5 minutes after telling William she wants to stay there on the chair, she begs Stephen to take her on the walk with him. This short dialogue might have gone unnoticed by most of the audience, but to me it was the indication that you could guess the real feelings and wishes of the characters only indirectly, never by their outspoken words.

Hope you are doing fine
Take Care
/ghazal

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Hi Ghazal, I know this feeling very well, that one is afraid of not fullfilling its own expectations.
Some people say we should learn to prioritize, refuse commitments which we dont see as important. Do the things, which you believe in, with all your energy, and skip the tasks which other people put on you. Of the few ideas which to me (as a complete a-religious person) appear of eternal value from the old testament are the words of Ecclesiast (or King Solomon):

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

moon old map

Thomas Wolfe regarded the old-testamentarian book of Ecclesiast as “… the noblest, the wisest, and the most powerful expression of man’s life upon this earth — and also the highest flower of poetry, eloquence, and truth. I am not given to dogmatic judgments in the matter of literary creation, but if I had to make one I could say that Ecclesiastes is the greatest single piece of writing I have ever known, and the wisdom expressed in it the most lasting and profound.”

The lyrics of Ecclesiastes or King Solomon inspired many musicians to write songs, the most famous perhaps being Pete Seeger, the legendary US protest singer who on the occasion of his 94th birthday was accompanied by a grateful audienence.

best regards Michael

An angel asked me for a letter of endorsement

No doubt Christmas time is on the verge again, and with it come this very weird species of christmas angels. They are populating the highstreets, department stores and all the media, and depending on where in the world one goes, they are called either kid Jesus Christ (Christkindl), Snowflake (Snegotchka) or End-of-Years-Winged-Puppet (Jahresabschluss-Fluegelpuppe).
But recently I received a personal message from somebody who most likely is up in heaven now. It was a request through one of the professional social media networks called ResearchGate, and it came from a person I knew very well.  In this message I was asked by Beatrix N., a former colleague from a colaborating institute, to write an endorsement for her skills in Genetics of complex diseases, transgenic mice and gene mapping.
The problem was, that Beatrix died already half a year ago in a dreadful accident, when a truck hit her on her bike.  She died in her mid 30s, and the institute for experiemental genetics lost one of their very social and scientifically commited researchers. My sorrow for her was only slightly eased by a scientific paper we wrote together  on Parkinson-Disease in a mutant mouse model.
When I received the ReserachGate request today, I thought how weired it is that people after death remain a member of the scientific community.  It would be nice to imagine that they carry on to contribute to science from heaven. Of course I am convinced that Beatrix made it up their, I think she would enjoy to argue with St Peter, since she was always very good in arguing. And if my “letter of endorsement” for her scientific skills helps her to open the gates of the paradise, I would be so happy. In particular I like the idea that with her eminent critical view onto our rotten society she might also drive the wardens of heaven a bit crazy.
Best greetings up there, Beatrix, and the next paper on mouse neurodegeneration we will dedicate to you personally.
Michael

The magic of a cup of wine at 24 000 feet altitude

During 360 days of the year I am sober, training myself to fulfill the commitments I made in an act of intellectual megalomania.

Keeping track of the several research projects, which I initiated before closing others, supervising the students and PhD students, trying to keep the collaboration projects running and the partners happy, doing at least some of the things which are expected from a husband and dad. And to fill also the last free evening of the week with something that does not require much brain (but only some basic guitar skills and sense of rhythm and music):  playing in our institutes band.  And all this arose as a good remedy to stop thinking of you every free minute.

But now on a flight back from Oslo, in an almost empty aircraft, when the flight attendants became extremely generous with the drinks, it only took two glasses of wine to become aware of how much I miss you since a year.

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