Where to Take Our Books?

A few weeks ago, Professor Sabine Wienker-Piepho, the Vice President of the Freiburg Museumsgesellschaft, gave an enchanting keynote speech on book ownership today. 

The term "bibliocide" was only partly appropriate, but it was apparent how concerned she was about the future of printed books. Here are some of her slides.

The Encyclopdia Britannica is no longer available in print but on the Internet. Unlike the free encyclopedia Wikipedia, you have to subscribe. Some people only trust the EB and are suspicious of Wikipedia.

As an IM (informal contributor) to the German version of Wikipedia, I would like to emphasize the ongoing topicality of its information and its completeness through swarm knowledge. At the same time, I stress that some of my Wikipedia colleagues are in a frenzy about making corrections. On the other hand, the style and grammar of WP articles often need improvement.

That there is a 14-volume Fairy Tale Encyclopedia was new to me.

This is not a work of art, but are unsold copies of the "best-selling" The Fifth Shade of Gray arranged in some fancy way in a bookshop in the UK. Books may seem to be selling less and less, but in the States, every guest on Stephen Colbert's Late Show, whether actor, sportsman, or politician, presents his/her newest book.

"Intellectual" Boris in front of a half-empty bookshelf in 10 Downing Street? On the top left is the book Sabine described as the dystopia of book ownership: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury from 1955. Red Baron still remembers the movie in which government agents hunt down books with flamethrowers.

The Church and governments have always tried to eliminate unpleasant views by burning books. Luther's writings were burned; in 1817, students consigned reactionary books to the fire at Wartburg Castle, and the book burning by the Nazis in 1933 was the high point so far.

There were attempts to burn books not only in Berlin but also in Freiburg.

The Documentation Center in Munich displays some of the books' titles consigned to the fire during the 3rd Reich in its vestibule.

Red Baron loves books, but he also suffers from the accumulated crowd.

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Here is the main shelf in my study, which contains physics books, history books, books on languages, and literature.

In my study, there is also a cupboard with special editions such as the works and the complete scientific edition of Christoph Lichtenberg, my Hans Küng collection, Karlheinz Deschner's complete Criminal History of Christianity, Annegarn's World History of 1899, Gottfried Keller's works, Theodor Fontane's works, Jean Paul's works, a three-volume Meyers Lexicon from 1931 to 1934 with an addendum on the Nazi seizure of power in volume 3, and art volumes.

My bedroom has a shelf with a lot of literature about Freiburg and DVDs ...

... and a second one with travel literature and comics. Since starting my job at CERN, I've collected a complete French edition of all the Asterix comics and many secondary literature on the subject.  Queezed in a corner is a charger with multiple outlets for my various iDevices.

In the living room, I keep the German classics that Elisabeth once inherited from her aunt Kathi. Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Lessing Kleist, and even Shakespeare were once a must in every German bourgeois household. A French literary history and many unique individual books are on the lower shelves.

Where do I take my books?

When I moved from Geneva to Freiburg in 2001, I offered most of my math and physics books to the university library. I had kept them in Geneva for 32 years, as German textbooks are not in demand in a French-speaking environment. The university library showed interest and asked me to bring the books over. That was too much because they were in two small boxes. Eventually, they sent a van.

Four years ago, I offered my Freiburg books to the city archive posthumous. Yes, they already had an extensive collection and would like well-preserved individual copies. I assume that interest has since died out completely.

Sabine's last slide is giving me a headache: Do books have their fates?

In the Middle Ages, every handwritten book was a treasure, and even after the invention of printing, books were initially expensive. During the Thirty Years' War, entire libraries were plundered and taken away, from Heidelberg to Rome, from Prague to Upsala.

Today, many publications are not worth the paper they were printed on.

In the discussion, many people anecdotally talked about their own experiences with too many books but had no solutions for their own floods.

Red Baron also has no solution for where to take his many books. He has started reading e-books and sees the advantages, not only in saving paper, but that's another story.

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Democracy and International Organizations

This was the last Saturday lecture in the Studium Generale on democracy in all its facets: Democracy - Foundations and Challenges.

It was a refreshing end to the series, as Professor Paulina Starski gave her talk in a charming, spirited, and convincing manner.

Abraham Lincoln gave the best definition of democracy. My American friends will rejoice.

The normative bases of democracy are constitutional law and international law. The right to democracy is in Article 21 of our Grundgesetz (Basic Law), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

But Paulina wanted to present the structure of democracy in a legally clean way. She showed the audience that in a democracy, there are structural principles such as the federal state, republic, democracy, and the rule of law. 

State objectives such as the welfare state, care for the environment, and animal welfare are distinguished from these structural principles.

Furthermore, in a democracy, there are objects of legitimacy, such as state authority, and subjects of legitimacy, such as the people.

Red Baron learned that the Peace of Westphalia concluded in Münster and Osnabrück is regarded as the birth of international law. Read more.

States, peoples, and individual groups, such as Non-Governmental Organizations and International Organizations (IOs), are important subjects of international law.

International Organizations deal with cross-border problems. Thus, some competences of individual states are assigned to IOs. When states cede sovereign rights to IOs, these bodies will have a de facto and legal impact on domestic issues.

Article 23 (1) of the German GG (Basic Law) stipulates that the federal government can transfer sovereign rights to IOs by law with the approval of the Bundesrat (German Senate).

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Here is an overview of the individual organizations of the United Nations.

Prof. Starski spent the rest of her presentation on the relationship between individual states and the European Union (EU). The institutions are listed as:

European Parliament

European Council is a collegiate body that defines the overall political direction and priorities of the European Union.

Council of the European Union, also known as the Council of Ministers, is the second legislative body. Together with the European Parliament, it amends and approves or vetoes the proposals of the European Commission.

European Commission

European Court of Justice

European Central Bank

European Court of Auditors.

The institutional structure of the EU is complex.

On the democratic legitimacy of the EU, Paulina showed a couple of densely labeled slides that were difficult to read and digest during the presentation. I reproduce two of them here.

Prof. Starski concluded that the European Parliament has only limited democratic legitimacy.

Paulina transferred Willy Brandt's famous call on her last slide: We should "dare more democracy" in the context of International Organizations.

I want to answer Paulina's call with a quote about democracy in the United Kingdom that I have never forgotten since my school days: "Our government system isn't one hundred percent democratic, but it works." My English teacher attributed the quote to Winston Churchill.

Churchill's statement, "Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time," is better known and documented.

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Science, Society, and Politics

This was the last seminar in the series Which Truths Can We Build Upon? Physics and Theology in Discourse, and it was held entirely in English. In the final discussion, it turned out that language was an issue. I'll come back to it later.

The seminar's organizer, Prof. Buchleitner, gives some ultimate instructions
to students Jayadevan and Sakhibov.
This scene reminds me of the recent European Football Championship
 when a coach talks to players before they enter the field. 

On previous occasions, up to five students had organized a seminar, but in this case, only two dealt with the topics of science, society, and politics.

Their second slide, which showed two of my favorite physicists, Sabine Hassenfelder and Neil deGrasse Tyson, already left me wanting more.

In my home country, everything has to be orderly and defined, so the students showed us two formulations of science.

Immanuel Kant wrote: "Every doctrine if it is to be a system, i.e., a whole of knowledge organized according to principles, is called science.

The Federal Administrative Court (Bundesverwaltungsgericht) defined science as everything that, in terms of content and form, is regarded as a serious attempt to ascertain truth.

The subtitle of this seminar was Critique of Scientism. Here is a definition:

The students presented even more subdivisions of scientism but concluded that scientific methods are not the only reliable avenues for obtaining knowledge.

As far as society is concerned, it sometimes has problems with science:

To contradict such a statement opens a new can of worms and goes beyond the scope of this blog.

In the States, some Evangelical parents keep their children out of certain science classes, afraid that scientific education will lead them to doubt and ultimately reject their faith.

On the other hand, Neil deGrass Tyson has a strong opinion on science education. But what really shocked me was when Karthik showed the following headline:

Will there no longer be contributions to physics from outstanding scientists from India? Who hasn't heard of Raman scattering and the Bose-Einstein statistics?

In the seminar discussion, somebody raised the question of whether there is ethics in science. I stood up and declared categorically: Physics has no moral, but physicists should have one!  

Remember Heisenberg's visit to Copenhagen, where he tried to convince Niels Bohr to talk to the Allies not to build the bomb. The meeting ended in a complete misunderstanding. 

In the movie Oppenheimer, the pricks of conscience of the builders of the bomb are apparent.

The discussion on ethics in science reminded me of a statement by Richelieu on the morality of states.

After the energetic intervention of Catholic France on the side of the Protestants in 1635 during the Thirty Years' War, the cardinal was reminded of the Christian virtues of forgiveness and charity. Richelieu responded with the following astonishing argument: "The interests of a state and religion are entirely different. The state must pursue Christian goals, but it is a political collective without an immortal soul and can advocate things not permitted to an individual Christian. The salvation of man, on the other hand, is finally realized in the hereafter, so it is not surprising that God wants the individual to leave vengeance to Him ... But the states have no continuance after this world; their salvation is now or not at all, i.e., The Bourbon king fights Habsburg emperor.

Here is another statement by Neil deGrasse Tyson:

I do not share Neil's opinion since this seminar posed the question that physicists can't answer, but theologians do. My Catholic school catechism from the elementary school in Hövelhof had the answer to, "What are we on earth for?" To love God, to serve him, and thereby go to heaven.

Astrophysicist deGrasse Tyson is an atheist. So the following statement is in line with his "belief" and research: I want [upon death] to be buried, just like in the old days, where I decompose by the action of microorganisms, and I am dined upon by any form of creeping animal or root system that sees fit to do so.… I will have recycled at least some of the energy that I have taken from it back to the universe.

Many foreign students study at German universities; their lingua franca is English. Holding this course in both languages was only partly successful. In the general discussion about the seminar, English-speaking students complained about the sometimes complicated German contexts. Nobody likes to reveal information beforehand, but I proposed that the slides to be presented be available on the university's ILIAS platform for study before the lecture.

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World Heritage of the Middle Ages

... is the title of an exhibition at the Archäologischen Landesmuseum Konstanz. This year, the Museumsgesellschaft Freiburg made its summer trip to Constance and Reichenau Island, commemorating the monastery's founding 1300 years ago. Professor Thomas Zotz, an expert on Middle Age history, guided our group.

St. Pirmin, reading his
Dicta Abbatis Pirminii, de Singulis Libris Canonicis Scarapsus?
(Words of Abbot Pirminius, extracts from the Single Canonical Books)

It all started in 724 when the peregrinating monk and missionary Pirmin founded a monastery on Reichenau Island. Benedictine monks preferred islands to settle.

The founding document of Reichenau was forged in the 12th century on a scraped-off predecessor and supports the legend of Reichenau. According to this, the monastery was founded in 724 on the orders of Charles Martel, who was Mayor of the palace (Hausmeier) of the Frankish Empire from 718-741.

Here is a statue of Benedict of Nursia

Benedict must have known the Psalms well, for he based one rule of the order on Psalm 116, verse 62: At midnight I will rise to give thanks to You. Because of your righteous judgments, Benedict continued invoking verse 164: Seven times a day, I praise you for your righteous rules.

The rules

The motto of the Benedictines was ora et labora. 

The monks used glosses to help them better understand the Latin texts.
They sometimes wrote these reading aids in Old High German directly into the original texts,
as in the case above in the Gospel of Luke.
These annotations are among the oldest treasures of the German language. (click to enlarge)

However, they not only labored on the most extensive estates of their abbeys but also inside the monastery walls, learning biblical texts.

 

The hierarchy

The region on the High Rhine and Lake Constance is characterized by the founding of many monasteries. 

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One of the exhibition's highlights is the Plan of Saint Gall, a medieval architectural drawing dating back to 820–830. It depicts an entire Benedictine monastic compound.

According to the most recent investigations, the plan is an original drawing made at Reichenau Abbey. Librarian Reginbert and the young monk Walafrid Strabo drew the plan and inscribed it with Latin verses. According to the inscription, it was intended to inspire Prior Gozbert at the St. Gall monastery.

St. Gallus

In the 820s, Gozbert planned to build a new abbey church to house the relics of the monastery's founder and namesake, the hermit Saint Gallus. Construction of the Basilica of Gall (Gallusbasilika) began in 830, and the church was sanctified after 835.

Reichenau Abbey was famous for its scribes and book illuminators.

The health problems of a scribe: A person who does not know how to write
does not believe it is work. O, how hard writing is: it dulls the eyes,
squeezes the kidneys, and simultaneously brings agony to all the limbs.
Three fingers write the whole body suffers ...
(Vita Harlinis et Reinilae around 850-880).

The dedicatory poem on the left reads:
This book, O Egbert, is full of divine teachings. Take it as a farewell greeting and rejoice for a long time.
In your honor, the blessed Au (Reichenau) offers it to you, Bishop.
On the right, Reichenau monks Keralt and Heribert hand manuscripts to Archbishop Egbert of Trier.

The Codex Egberty is one of the highlights of Ottonian book illumination. The Evangelistary was made at the Reichenau and dedicated to the Archbishop of Trier, Egbert (977-993). The codex contains 51 scenes from the life of Christ, making it the oldest and most comprehensive series of images on this subject in the Middle Ages.

The statue of St. Mark in front of the Minster dedicated to St. Mary and him

The next day of the summer trip, the group was taken to the Reichenau. The first stop was an extensive visit to St. Mary and St. Mark's Minster.

Abbot Haito had a Carolingian basilica built in a cruciform, parts of which are still preserved in the crossing and the east transept. It was consecrated on 16 August 816 in honor of the Virgin Mary. 

St. Marc's shrine garnished with written intercessions

In 830, Verona Bishop Randolt transferred St. Mark the Evangelist relics to the cathedral.

The nave of the basilica with a view of the altar

In April 2024, on the occasion of the cathedral's 1,300th anniversary, Pope Francis elevated it to the status of basilica minor.

An oversized Pirmin in a boat approaches the already built-up Reichenau

On the way to the church choir, we passed a painting on the history of the monastery's origins.

Our guide is standing on the tomb slab of Duke Gerold,
a Prefect of Bavaria. He died in 799 (©hj)

Our guide was talkative and told us many stories, Dönekes, as they say in the Westphalian dialect. Indeed, he had my mother's accent. I told him outright that he was from Westphalia, to which he replied affirmatively.

On the right wall of the choir is Mary with the child, the Minster's patron saint.

View into the choir

The festive flag of the Catholic Church, based on the flag of the Vatican, is white for Christ, light, and resurrection. A dull yellow replaces gold, a surrogate that Germans know so well.

And there are plenty of celebrations in this church. In addition to the regular Catholic holidays, the people of Reichenau celebrate their island holidays. On the Feast of St. Mark on April 25, the Feast of the Holy Blood on the Monday after Trinity Sunday, and the Feast of the Assumption on August 15, all work stops, stores are closed, and children are off school. This is when the island people take the reliquaries from the cathedral treasury and carry them in processions across the Reichenau.

Painting in the choir: A list of the owners, patrons,
and benefactors of the Holy Blood of Jesus Christ here in Reichenau.

Another relic kept in St. Mary and St. Mark's Minster is the holy blood of Christ.

In the church's treasury, I saw a stained glass window from 1510 showing the Annunciation of Mary flanked by Saints Pirmin and Benedict. The lower part depicts the nativity scene with the three wise men from the East, identified here as kings in the early tradition.

On the way to the monastery garden, I passed a Pieta.

The exit from the church to the monastery garden was low and narrow.

Some participants sank to their knees before the splendor of the flowers in the center.

The impressive church building from the perspective of garden visitors.

One last look at the choir as we left for lunch at the restaurant "mein Inselglück" (My Island Bliss).

©MS (Click to enlarge)

After the meal, we reposed blissfully on the restaurant's terrasse, dozing or contemplating the "sweet" landscape.

Look into the western apsis
with a door through which our guide was supposed to arrive.

In the afternoon, our first stop was the church of St. George, built in the late 9th century to house the relic head of the Saint. 

The Reichenau Abbot Hatto, who in 891 also became Archbishop of Mainz and thus Archchancellor of the East Frankish Empire, received a reliquary of the skull of St. George from Pope Formosus in Rome in 896. Our guide showed us a photo.

Our guide was devoted to her job.

St. George is world-famous for its mural paintings dating back to the 10th century. These are often referred to as frescoes in English descriptions. The “correct“ English description is fresco-secco. I have changed  the Wikipedia article on the Church of Saint George (Reichenau) accordingly.

This well-known story happened on Lake Genezaret near Capernaum: Then Jesus got into the boat, and his disciples followed him. Suddenly, a furious storm came up on the lake, so the waves swept over the boat. But Jesus was sleeping. The disciples went and woke him, saying, "Lord, save us! We're going to drown!" He replied, "You of little faith, why are you so afraid?" Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm. (Matthew 8:23-28).

The fresco-secco paintings on the other side.

The German expression Es geht auf keine Kuhhaut is translated into English as It's going too far, or  It beggars description and today, it means just that. But where does the strange expression come from? Here is the famous mural of a cow's skin at St. Georges. A devil writes on it, "I want to write here about the stupid women; the blah-blah spoken here all week will be remembered when it comes before the judge."

The inscription is aimed at female churchgoers who gossip and spread lies and fake news. In the Middle Ages, people believed the devil recorded all sins on parchment. The predecessor of today's paper was made from goatskin or cowhide. As parchment was expensive, only the essential things were written down. For the devil, these were sins. When there were too many, they would no longer fit on a cow's skin.

Prof. Zotz is waiting for a few latecomers
to begin his lecture on the church's history.

Our last stop on this remarkable Museumsreise was visiting the Romanesque Basilica, St. Peter and Paul. Bishop Egino of Verona built the first church on this site in 799. After his resignation and Abbot Waldo's permission, Egino withdrew to his richly furnished cella on the western tip of Reichenau, where he died in 802. 

 Thank you, Thomas. You immersed the group deeply into the medieval history of Reichenau Island. Thanks to Gertraud, too, for the perfect organization of this trip.

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