Maximilian Dortu

Dortu mausoleum at the old Wiehre cemetery

Today, as every year, I commemorated Maximilian Dortu at the old Wiehre cemetery, where in the early hours of July 31, 1849, he was executed by a Prussian firing squad. This year, cabaret artist Matthias Deutschmann addressed a relatively big crowd in Dortu's honor compared to the usually smaller number of loyal participants.

Dortu's parents' house on Dortustraße in Potsdam. Destroyed during the war,
the former GDR had the building restored to its original state for propaganda reasons.
It served and still serves as a primary school.
I took this and the following photo during my recent visit to Potsdam.

Born in 1826, Max was the only son of a wealthy Huguenot family in Potsdam. He is not well known in Germany except in his birthplace - where a street upon which his parents' house once stood is named after him - and in Freiburg, where he died in 1849. His entry in the English Wikipedia is just a stub.

Commemorative plaque on Dortu's parents' house

Young Dortu was one of the martyrs of the German Revolution of 1848/49. Following the Napoleonic wars, the German states were restored into barely reformed monarchies at the Congress of Vienna. The aim of the revolution that started in Germany in March 1848 was to establish a republic in a unified Germany. Right from the start, the revolutionary forces had to fight both the rulers clinging to their territories and a satisfied bourgeoisie preferring constitutional monarchies to a republic. This double opposition was too much, and soon governmental forces crushed the uprisings except in Germany's southwest, where people like Dortu hung on. Ultimately a powerful Prussian intervention force headed by the "Grape-Shot Prince" (Kartätschenprinz) Wilhelm was needed to defeat the revolutionary movement in Baden.

Dortu coined the nickname Kartätschenprinz for Wilhelm, who used this lethal weapon during the March 1848 uprisings against the people of Berlin. This is the same guy who, in 1871, became Kaiser Wilhelm upon Germany's unification into the Second Reich.

Being sought for acts of sabotage, Dortu fled Prussia and subsequently joined the still-active revolutionary movement in Baden in 1849. He even rose to the rank of Major in the revolutionary army at the age of 23. When the Prussian intervention army eventually got hold of him in Freiburg, they charged him with high treason and sentenced him to death. In the early hours of July 31, 1849, he died at the Wiehre cemetery in front of a firing squad.

Brothers, aim well!
I die full of joy and courage, for I fought for the nation's liberation.

Red Baron was there in his red Madison revolutionary T-shirt.
A good friend of mine, the organizer of the yearly commemoration, took the picture.

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A Quarrel about the German Döner

My earlier blog dealing with the German döner has some follow-up. The other day I read in the Badische Zeitung that it was Nevzar Salim in Reutlingen, Baden-Württemberg, who invented the German type of döner as early as 1969. In contrast, Kadir Nurman in Berlin, now regarded as the father of the Döner, was only second in 1971. Now the quarrel is on between two Turks of a type the French have long called une querelle d'Allemand, a German quarrel. Maybe these two Turks are an excellent example of fully assimilated foreigners in Germany who simply cannot help quarreling about a minor thing, as the Germans are known for in France.

©Der Spiegel

Here are the facts: The döner kebap - in Turkey generally served as a delicacy on a plate only about once a week - Kadir handed over to Turkish guest workers in a bun until Germans started to like the food and adopted it. In the meantime, the grilled meat has come to be served in pita bread with salad, onions, and sauce, and Turks working in Berlin have exported this German döner to Turkey successfully.

Although Berlin is regarded as the döner capital, Nevzat Salim said he was the first to serve döner at a stand in front of Reutlingen's town hall in 1969, "In the beginning, my father and I had difficulties finding pita bread, so we served the meat (a normal bun being too small) in a double bun." 

Nevzat continued, "I have a role in the long history of the German döner. I don't want a title or celebrity, but what is right must remain right." Une querelle de Turk ou d'Allemand?

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Gap Sites

In an earlier blog, I wrote about a gap site at Freiburg's Kaisers-Josef-Straße that was unusual: Suddenly, the choir of the St. Martin church became visible when standing on the Münster Square.

In the meantime, there is another gap site, this time on Salzstraße. It is less spectacular but also reveals a choir. This choir belongs to the church of the former monastery of the Augustiner hermits.

View onto the choir of the former Augustiner Church.

The building activities are part of the reconstruction of Freiburg's spectacular Augustinermuseum housed on the premises of the abandoned monastery. In the first phase, the former nave was transformed into an exhibition hall showing, among other artifacts, the impressive statues of the prophets that once decorated the outside of the Münster. The original figures were replaced by 4-meter-high replicas.

Statues of the prophets

The second construction phase comprises the building of a gatehouse fitting into the old style. The new building complex shall house the museum's collection of engravings.

Architect's view of the new Augustinermuseum

The third and final phase will concentrate on the renovation of the cloisters.

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Is there a Hiccup with the Higgs?

Everybody has recently written about the Higgs particle's discovery, so Red Baron decided not to join the crowd. But when the Badische Zeitung published a surprising cartoon yesterday and I read about Stephen Hawking being a lousy gambler this morning, I changed my mind.

Let us face it, the Higgs boson is Lust und Frust (lust and frustration) for the physics community. On the one hand, its experimental evidence confirms the Standard Model filling out the missing link that gives all other particles their mass. On the other hand, physicists are frustrated that the experimental results at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN so far have not given any hint to New Physics like supersymmetry or string theory bound to explain, e.g., dark matter.

Hatzinger in the Badische Zeitung of July 6, 2012

Hatzinger's Cartoon needs some translation. Es wurmt ihn offenbar, dass man wieder ein Teilchen von ihm entdeckt hat: It seems to bug him that they discovered another part of Him. Here, Hatzinger makes a subtle allusion to the God particle. Higgs, or rather Hicks, is the onomatopoetic sound of drunk people in Germany.

Stephen Hawking at CERN in 2006

Stephen Hawking, the twenty-century genius, likes to bet and lose. On MSNBC's Cosmic Log, you read: About 10 years ago, Gordon Kane, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan, discussed some of the issues while he and Hawking were together at a physics conference.

"Stephen interrupted and said he would like to bet me that there was no Higgs boson," Kane recalled today. It took a while to work out the conditions of the $100 bet, and at one point, things looked so dim for the search that Kane sent Hawking a check, according to The Detroit News.

But this week, when researchers at the LHC announced that a subatomic particle matching the Higgs boson's general description had been discovered, it was Hawking's turn to concede the bet. "It seems I have just lost $100," he told the BBC's Pallab Ghosh. The article continues:

Concerning the Higgs boson, Hawking hoped there'd be a less orthodox and more elegant mechanism to explain how some particles have mass while others don't. Finding the Standard Model Higgs boson and nothing else would be a disappointing outcome — as fellow physicist Stephen Wolfram pointed out in a blog posting today.

"If the decay and other interactions of this particle are as we expect, that will be strong evidence for the so-called Standard Model of particle physics, the theory that explains all our experiments so far," Hawking said. "This is an important result and should earn Peter Higgs the Nobel Prize. But it is a pity, in a way, because the great advances in physics have come from experiments that gave results we didn't expect."

This was the case when, in 1974, two physicists in the States, Burton Richter at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Samuel Chao Chung Ting at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, simultaneously discovered the J/ψ particle, a quark compound of charm and anti-charm nobody had been waiting for. The discovery was one of these magic moments of glory in physics, opening up a whole new physics that eventually ended in today's Standard Model.

If the particle revealed this week is a non-Standard Model Higgs boson, Hawking might still be able to hang onto his $100, and the cosmos will get that much more mysterious. But in any case, Kane is moving on to the next big thing: supersymmetry, the idea that every one of the subatomic particles we've detected to date has a weird twin we haven't yet been able to see. Such a concept could explain the nature of dark matter, which accounts for far more of the universe than the ordinary matter we see around us.

As strange as it sounds, Gordon Kane thinks it's possible to find evidence of supersymmetry — and he's willing to put his money where his mouth is. "I'd love to have bets on supersymmetry," he told me, "but no one will take them."

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4th of July Surprise

In 2010 I reported a Waldseemüller map that our Chancellor Angela Merkel donated to the Library of Congress. Martin Waldseemüller is the guy who made a map of the world and named the new continent in the west of the old world America.

Foto: AFP

Surprise: Today, on American Independence Day, the Badische Zeitung reported that two female scientists found a more miniature copy of Waldseemüller’s 500-year-old map in the Munich University Library hidden in a two-hundred-year-old book about geometry.

Their discovery presents the fifth copy of this so-called Globuskarte (globe map) printed around 1510. Its segments, when properly arranged, fold nicely into a sphere of 11 cm diameter.

The detail on the left shows a rather rudimentary form of North America, whereas the dimensions of South America were a little better known at the time of Waldseemüller. The mass of land in the south served as the place to print the name for the new continent: America.

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