Michael Johansson

Check out some of the great works of Swedish contemporary artist Michael Johansson, who specializes in tetris-like arrangements of everyday objects!

It kind of reminds me of the oldie-but-goodie Conan sketch about (fairly offensive) German TV show Stackenblocken.

WOLF!!

A wolf has been seen roaming my old Swedish neighborhood of Västra Frölunda in Göteborg!!


It was then seen downtown, probably cruising the shops on the trendy Avenyn.

It was seen again in Slottsskogen park, a place that I relaxed in on many a sunny Swedish afternoon. The wolf has not yet been caught, but conservation officers are apparently tracking it.

This event is NOT helping Swedes to contradict the rumor that arctic animals like polar bears roam the streets...

German Book Club @GI

I attended the Los Angeles Goethe Institute's German Book Club meeting, where we discussed Thomas Mann's novel, Tonio Kröger. It was a great discussion, though there were only a few of us there.


Next on their agenda is the discussion of the Grimm Märchen, coming up from 12-2pm on Thursday, February 21. I plan to go to that too and hopefully recruit some German friends. There are some amazingly decadent editions of Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales out there. I can't wait to read some of the Märchen I have never read before.



I listened to an awesome episode of the American Public Media program The Story, which featured Harvard Professor Maria Tatar discussing the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm. She served as the editor for a new, annotated version of the collection (I WANT this!!). You can listen to this episode by visiting their page.




If you have never been to the Goethe Institute in Los Angeles before, it really is a very cool place! After signing up for a membership card, you can rent movies from their huge collection! They have German language movies, movies by German directors and movies about Germany. They also have some German language books for rent and they provide services and events for the Germanophile community here in LA. PLUS- their mostly lime-green office looks pretty rad.

MLK Jr Day

In honor of the continuing effort to eliminate racial discrimination everywhere, I offer this article about Hans Massaquoi as food for thought. Author and journalist Massaquoi was just a young boy when he was excluded from participating in "Aryan-only" activities (including the Hitler Youth meetings and assignments) because he was black. His Wikipedia article notes that Massaquoi was not persecuted as an Afro-German, but was "just" a second-class citizen, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

Mr. Massaquoi died yesterday at his home in Florida, but had returned to Germany many times after he immigrated to the US following WWII. His legacy is his autobiography, Destined to Witness- Growing up Black in Nazi Germany.

Structures Created...and Destroyed

The "Slinky Springs to Fame" bridge in Oberhausen, Germany is one of the coolest photo-op spots out there right now! Check out some amazing pictures and read all about the pedestrian footbridge over the Rhine River here.

You can also check out architect Tobias Rehberger's works for sale on artnet. (Hmm... his Wikipedia article appears only in German. Possible translation project...)

And though many new architectural creations are completed every day, many are also destroyed. Check out what happened yesterday in Stockholm when a cleaning lady took charge of a tram and crashed it in to a 3 story residential building!! Read about it here! (Did it jump the tracks or something?)

And they say there are no language jobs...

Thomas Mann

The German book club at the Goethe Institute of Los Angeles is meeting for the first time in 2013 next Thursday and I am going! We will be discussing Tonio Kröger by Thomas Mann. My copy recently came in the mail and I can't wait to start reading it. 

I read two Mann novels as a grad student at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. They were Mario und der Zauberer and der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice). Both of these relatively short works were essential to my understanding of the German language and I can't wait to read the third. 

Mann was a real character in his own non-fiction life. He fled from Germany for Switzerland in 1933 and later emigrated to the US, where he taught at Princeton. His family moved to Southern California until 1952 when he moved back to Switzerland and lived until his death in 1955. 

He won the Nobel Prize in 1929, "principally for his great novel, Buddenbrooks, which has won steadily increased recognition as one of the classic works of contemporary literature".

He is considered to be one of the most prominent figures in the German literary genre of Exile Literature. The personal struggles with which he dealt throughout his life seem to provide fodder for many of his works (though we must be careful not to confuse writer and written). One famous controversy surrounding his work Death in Venice was the discovery that the man characters object of lust-Tadzio- turned out to be based on a real stranger that Mann saw running on the beach in Italy: 

The real Tadzio

Thomas Mann's wife Katia (in 1974 book) recalls that the idea for the story came during an actual holiday in Venice (staying at the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido), which she and Thomas took in the summer of 1911:

All the details of the story, beginning with the man at the cemetery, are taken from experience … In the dining-room, on the very first day, we saw the Polish family, which looked exactly the way my husband described them: the girls were dressed rather stiffly and severely, and the very charming, beautiful boy of about 13 was wearing a sailor suit with an open collar and very pretty lacings. He caught my husband's attention immediately. This boy was tremendously attractive, and my husband was always watching him with his companions on the beach. He didn't pursue him through all of Venice—that he didn't do—but the boy did fascinate him, and he thought of him often … I still remember that my uncle, Privy Counsellor Friedberg, a famous professor of canon law in Leipzig, was outraged: "What a story! And a married man with a family!"^[4]

The boy who inspired "Tadzio" was Baron Władysław Moes, whose first name was usually shortened as Władzio or just Adzio. This story was uncovered by Thomas Mann's translator, Andrzej Dołęgowski, around 1964, and was published in the German press in 1965. Some sources report that Moes himself did not learn of the connection until he saw the 1971 film version of the novel.

Władysław Moes was born on 17 November 1900 in Wierbka, the second son and fourth child of Baron Alexander Julius Moes. He was aged 10 when he was in Venice, significantly younger than Tadzio in the novella. Baron Moes died on 17 December 1986 in Warsaw and is interred at the Powązki Cemetery there. He was the subject of a biography, The Real Tadzio (Short Books, 2001) by Gilbert Adair.

(From the Death in Venice Wikipedia page) 

I can't wait to read yet another fascinating novel by this literary master! It will be so stimulating to be discussing German literature once again.