Edith Stein

Poster with Edith Stein. I took the photo in her cell in the St. Placidus guest house.
Note the mirror image, which shows a photo gallery and the entrance door.

Seventy years ago, on August 9, 1942, the Nazis murdered Edith Stein in Auschwitz. 

Yesterday, Elisabeth and I participated in a guided tour of Edith Stein's traces in Freiburg.

The stained-glass window in the choir ambulatory of the Freiburger Münster.
Note in the back the Carmel mountains, in front the cross, the seven-branched candelabrum,
and the evergreen Mediterranean cypress as a symbol of eternal life.

I won't go through the biography of that extraordinary woman; you may want to read it on Wikipedia. Born as a Jew, she became an atheist during her studies. While working as an assistant for the philosopher Edmund Husserl at Freiburg University during the First World War, she experienced her Damascene conversion.

Here on Goethestraße 63, Edith Stein lived as Husserl's assistant from 1916 to 1917
about 200 meters from the professor's house on Lorettostraße 40.

When visiting the widow of one of her colleagues who had just fallen on the Western Front, she did not meet a desperate woman but a lady comforted and fortified by her Christian faith. Deeply disturbed, Edith looked further. 

After reading the autobiography of the mystic St. Teresa of Ávila, who, on her deathbed, ought to have said "sin amor, todo es nada," Edith asked to be baptized Catholic. When she wanted to enter Teresa's Order of the Carmelites immediately, the prior of the Abbey of Beuron convinced her not to hide her light in a Carmel but rather to serve the Catholic cause, e.g., as a teacher.

Edith, being a woman, had tried vainly to become a full professor during her years with Husserl. In 1918, she relinquished her assistantship with him to teach at the Dominican nuns' school in Speyer, where she continued her philosophical studies to reconcile Husserl's phenomenology with Thomism.

An altarpiece in the cathedral of Speyer names Edith Stein
a Jew, an atheist, a Christian, a Carmelite, and a martyr.
I took the photo in August 2011 when visiting the exhibition:
The Saliens.

In the fall of 1931, she left Speyer and returned to Freiburg to resume work on her habilitation treatise at the philosophical faculty. Now she lived in a small room under the roof of the guesthouse St. Placidus of the monastery St. Lioba in Günterstal, participating as closely as possible in the nuns' daily lives.

Commemorative plate at the entrance to St. Placidus guest house at Günterstal

Sister Placida, her mentor, remembered: When I visited her in her cell in the early evening hours, I was always astonished to find not too many books. It was the crucifix above her desk that taught her ultimate knowledge. One evening, she looked up at the crucified King of the Jews and sighed: How much will my people have to suffer. I was stunned, but considering the mounting hate against the Jews, a thought flashed through my mind: Edith will make herself a sin offering for her people.

Edith Stein's desk in her cell at the St. Placidus guest house.

In 1932 Edith took up an appointment as a lecturer at the Institute for Pedagogy in Münster, Westphalia, but following anti-Semitic legislation passed by the Nazi government in 1933, she, being a Jew, resigned not to damage the reputation of her institute. When a letter she had sent to the pope deploring the inhuman Nazi regime in Germany remained unanswered, Edith considered that she was of no use anymore in this world and entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery St. Maria vom Frieden (Our Lady of Peace) at Cologne in October 1933. She took the name Teresia Benedicta a Cruce (Teresia Benedicta of the Cross).

Following her arrest in a Dutch Carmel on October 2, 1942, a Gestapo henchman asked her about her confession. She answered Catholic, but he retorted: You are just a Jew. When a train took her to her final destiny five days later, Edith confessed: I shall die for my people.

Commemorative stone in Freiburg's university church.

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Odd Potsdam

With 160,000 inhabitants, Potsdam is smaller than Freiburg, which has a population of 220,000. Houses in the city's old quarters are mainly two stories high, with rooms built into the roof for housing soldiers, as Potsdam was a garrison town. At the time of the Prussian kings, cuddling up was encouraged, and many a man ended up in a rapid marriage with the landlord's daughter. The king needed soldiers.

Although these houses resemble brick buildings today, is it sufficient to remove the plaster to reveal their timber frame construction? What you see in the gateway is not smoke but a droplet of water on the lens of my camera, for we had April weather in July.

The Steuben monument, too, defied the rain.

Once donated by the American Congress, the statue was lost during the war and recast.

The numerous parks, situated amid lakes and along the Havel River, make Potsdam a pleasant place to live. Here, you look along with one of Potsdam's famous sightlines (Sichtachsen) from the Neuer Garten over the Heiliger See to the dome of St. Nikolaikirche.

Map of historical Potsdam

The Stadtschloss is the big building on the left-hand side, with the bridge pointing to it. Located above, on the other side of the square called Alter Markt, is St. Nikolaikirche.

Rebuilding of the exterior of the Potsdam Stadtschloss in its original splendor is underway. The interior, however, will fulfill present needs. The Brandenburg state parliament, now housed outside the city, will move in.

The distribution of deputies according to their parties in the Brandenburg State Parliament

In this peculiar case, the color code of the German parties I presented earlier does not hold. Only the Green Party and the Free Democrats retain their colors, while the seats of the Christian Democrats, with no visible black light, are depicted in a somewhat fitting clerical violet. A red-red coalition governs the state of Brandenburg; however, it is challenging to distinguish between Social Democrats and the post-communist Die Linke by their color. Typically, in graphical presentations, Social Democrats are depicted in red, with Die Linke shown in amber. Here, Die Linke is emerging somewhat pink, while the Social Democrats have lost some of their traditional red, incorporating some liberal colors to create an unusual orange.

Under the communist regime in the GDR, Christianity declined to the extent that nowadays, the federal states in Germany's east are missionary territories. There is a Kircheneintrittsstelle (a long word for mission point) at St. Nikolaikirche. In the background is the building site of the Stadtschloss. 

A unique Brandenburg vocabulary at the entrance door of the Haus der Brandenburgisch-Preußischen Geschichte that I tried to order historically: Fehrbellin, Hugenotten, Toleranz, Kartoffel, Wanderungen (durch die Mark Brandenburg), Pfifferlinge, Pickelhaube, Sommerferien, Automobil, Neubauern, Pionier, Mauer, Wende, Punk.

By the way, fried Pfifferlinge (my first chanterelles in 2012!) is one of my favorite dishes. I downed them, you guessed it, with Köstritzer Schwarzbier. 

At the hotel bar, I ordered a top-fermented wheat beer (Weizen), which is strangely made from rye (Roggen). The brewery calls the beer Roggen-Weizen, which I found disturbing, although the beer was excellent in its crooked glass.

Many regard Klaus Störtebeker as the German Robin Hood. He and his companions, the Victual Brothers (Viktualienbrüder), practiced piracy on the Baltic Sea and the estuary mouth of the Elbe River. Whether he really was the Likedeeler (lower German for dealing with everybody alike), always taking from the rich and giving it to the poor, is challenging to say, for he and his staff were beheaded in Hamburg back in 1401.

A modern castle called Cecilienhof, built in 1917 for Crown Prince Wilhelm and his wife, Cecilie, and located in the park Neuer Garten (New Garden), served as the venue where, in 1945, the Big Three decided about Europe's future after World War II.

Stalin, honored by a red star in the courtyard of the building, decided that Eastern Europe was to be dominated by communism, extending the Soviet Union virtually over the Balkan states, Poland, and the eastern part of Germany. Factually, the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic states.

Here, you may try your language skills.

The other two leaders in Potsdam were weak: Harry Truman, who had replaced the recently deceased Franklin D. Roosevelt, was not yet at ease on the international stage. At the same time, bulldog Winston Churchill had to make way for Labour's Clement Attlee in the decisive phase of the Conference when his Conservatives lost the general election.

East German nostalgia. I counted three Trabis, officially called Trabant, in front of our hotel. The parked cars reminded me of a defeatist story in the former GDR. Asking the question: What are one, two, or three Trabants? The answer was: One Trabant is a socialist achievement, two Trabants are the solution to the problem of finding spare parts, three Trabants are the weekly car production of the Zwickau auto works.

Here is a sign of a hairdresser advertising his no-waiting services. I discovered it in Neuruppin, a garrison town where King Frederick Wilhelm had once banned young Frederick following his aborted escape from his father. 

The writing on the sign is, as we say in German, and fitting the circumstance, drawn by the hair, i.e., far-fetched. You just use "Kamm* in ohne Termin" to get your hair cut, whereas Kamm in German, unfunnily, means comb.

*pronounced "come" in German

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Friederisiko

The greeting of the Potsdam visitor

In my first blog in 2012, I not only mentioned the 300th birthday of Frederick the Great, commemorated in Germany, but also reflected on the character of this Prussian king, joining Schiller in his remark: "I cannot get fond of that guy."

Presently at Frederick's residence in Potsdam, an exhibition in the New Palace, named Friederisiko, attempts to retrace the Prussian king's life, the title alluding to his frequent playing of vabanque during war. Frederick moaned through his early life: I must fight three women, Maria-Theresa of Austria, Madame de Pompadour of France, and Elisabeth of Russia. It is a historical fact that the sudden death of one of Frederick's archenemies, the Tsarina, averted Prussia's total military defeat. Her son and successor, Peter, the king's great admirer, agreed to an armistice. This unexpected turn became known as the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg.

Following the Peace Treaty of Hubertusburg, Frederick began rebuilding his country and completing the Park of Sanssouci. In constructing the New Palace, he wanted to show the world that Prussia was still not on her knees and even had the financial resources to build such a useless building. In fact, Frederick preferred living at the Sans Souci Palace and used the New Palace only for official receptions and to host his guests. His successors chose to stay in Berlin, Prussia's capital, and when in Potsdam, resided in the cozier Charlottenhof.

Plan of the Sans Souci Park with important buildings marked in red.
To the right is the vineyard terrace that leads up to the Sans Souci Palace.
The circular building in the lower middle is the tea pavilion, and to the left is the New Palace.
Far in the south, the tiny red dot is Charlottenhof.

At the entrance to Sans, Souci Fredrick's revenant playing traverse flute asks for an obol.
In the back, the famous historic windmill.

Sans, Souci under thunderclouds

The comma behind Sans -- does it allude to Frederick's missing virile member?
It had been amputated in his young years following an infection of gonorrhea.
Historians are still discussing the issue, including Frederick's sexual preferences.

Our guide, as other tourists had before, honored Frederick's tomb with a potato.
Frederick introduced the potato into Brandenburg, a crop well-suited to the sandy ground.
The story is that Prussian soldiers fed on potatoes fought better
than soldiers of enemy armies, who still depended on cereals.

View of Sans, Souci from below. Today, the grapes grown on the wine terrace are Scheurebe.
At the time of Fredrick, gardeners tried out wide varieties to deliver grapes
to the king, who was crazy about fresh fruit of all kinds.
Frederick was willing to pay a fortune for a handful of cherries in February.

The tea pavilion in the park is constructed in a style that people thought was Chinese.
It was à la mode at Frederick's time.
The nuns had come all the way from Poland to honor a guy who did not care about religion:
Every man should go to heaven in his own way.

Apparently, the Chinese not only invented papel, gun powdel, and porcelain.
But also the saxophone?

Frederick is everywhere and in all forms.
Here, with a hat made from porcelain, inviting tourists to buy chinaware
 made in the Royal Prussian Porcelain Manufactory

Even in the hotel, a plastic sculpture bid us Good Morning on our way to breakfast.

While the guided tour concentrated on Frederick's Potsdam, we also visited Rheinsberg. As a young man far from his father's knout, the Prince felt happy writing poetry, making music, and partying with friends. Frederick wrote: My entire mind is turned to philosophy. It does me good service. I am happy, as I am much calmer than I was before.

Rheinsberg Castle, seen from the lakeside, with our group in the foreground.

Young Frederick. His statue in Rheinsberg.

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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 large 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, displaying, among other artifacts, the impressive statues of the prophets that once decorated the exterior of the Münster. The original figures were replaced by 4-meter-high replicas.

Statues of the prophets

The second construction phase comprises building a gatehouse that fits 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 of New Physics, such as supersymmetry or string theory, which are 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 twentieth-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 those magic moments of glory in physics, opening up a whole new physics that eventually culminated 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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