hem|mungen

Yuck. Misplaced apostrophes.

So what reeeally bugs me is a misplaced apostrophe. Imagine my shock and disgust when I started noticing the same phenomenon in German! Signs (for bars, or tanning salons, or whatever) are frequent sites for a misunderstanding of the genitive in German. This is all explained beautifully at Idiotenapostroph.

Of course I can't find proof of this now (you'll have to take my word for it), but I have seen this mistake in old photographs of early 1900s Berlin, so it's not new, and I wonder if it isn't also traceable to something other than a misappropriation of English grammar.

[via PlasticThinking.]

Matchbox!

We had this one. And this, but this one was my very favorite Matchbox car. Who knows where it is now. Sigh. Which ones did you have?

[via Things.]

Werner Tübke

Ostblog has two entries on the death of Werner Tübke and the Leipziger Schule. Tübke died last week; he was one of the cornerstones of Leipzig's mainstream art scene, along with Wolfgang Mattheuer, who died this spring, and Bernhard Heisig, who lives outside of Berlin. Tübke made arrangements late last year to leave his archive to the GNM in Nuremberg.

[I just got home after a week away and find that I haven't quite processed this news. I hope to offer something more thoughtful sometime later.]

Art / History

Friedrich Christian Flick, an art collector and philanthropist, is planning to give his collection to the Hamburger Bahnhof as a permanent loan. This offer has drawn a lot of criticism because Flick's grandfather used slave and forced labor during the war; Germany's Jewish Central Council has said that the collection was built up with "blood money," and that Flick's generosity could "outshine" the crimes of his grandfather, but "can never mitigate them." The Foundation of the National Museums of Berlin has defended Flick, saying that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren can't bear an eternal familial guilt, and, essentially, that art shouldn't be a victim of history. (Remember that the Berlin museums recently made a big show of returning a Friedrich to the decendents of its former owner after it was discovered that the painting was forcibly purchased by the Nazis.)

In an public letter in the Tagesspiegel, Flick said he was "shocked" by the Central Council's accusations of whitewashing:

Blood money. Bringing this expression into the debate means, if one follows it through, that I have blood on my hands. And further still: so do my children, and their children after them, all of the employees who receive a salary from me, even the waiters whom I give tips. Blood money: this phrase makes me responsible for the deeds of my grandfather, actions for which he was condemned at Nuremburg, and for which I also condemned him—but for which I cannot be found guilty. This expression, I feel, seeks to set me outside of the community, to criminalize me.

The collection, which has yet to be described in much detail (apparently over 1800 works by 150 artists), has caused interesting reactions, especially among Berlin's politicians. Thomas Flierl, Berlin's senator for culture, suggested that while accepting the collection raises painful questions about Germany's past, it might be a chance to "make the historical rupture with which the city and all of German society lives with into the focus of a public discussion of the past."

It's the old question: when / where does blame for the "deeds of the fathers" stop? Not easy to reconcile.

Ruins

Yesterday Things featured some thoughts on ruins. I’ve seen a few of Heiko Hebig’s photos of the Ruhr industrial landscape before, but not these two series, which are really lovely. Part of me thinks its impossible to take a bad photograph of an old, abandoned mill or factory. Something about the dual nature of disused industrial buildings: their massive size and utter emptiness, their functional construction and permanent stasis, those sorts of contrasts make them interesting subjects. When a smokestack falls down, there’s a rare and precious moment of action. (This one made me wonder who you have to know to be present at the demolition…)

I dug around mentally a bit and remembered Lostplaces.de, which collects images and information on disused buildings and disappearing towns around Germany. It has a definite emphasis on things military but it’s not reactionary nostalgia. The series on gas stations has a more pop culture feel to it and the documentations of former German-German border crossings [here, here, and here] captures the eerie and apparently permanent stillness of that no-man’s land.

This leaves me thinking about the ruins of Kassel in the 1950s: I’m working on the first documenta at the moment, and the Fridericianum, the show’s main building, was still in pretty bad shape in 1955. Looking at photographs of abandoned, demolished, or even bombed-out buildings can’t compare (I suspect) to being present in the ruins. This is what always strikes me in thinking about postwar Germany: living among rubble, the clearing away of the rubble, and then, once the rubble is totally gone and new construction takes its place, living with the memory of ruins, even when they’re not there. In the case of Kassel, it seems to me that, rather than gesturing towards a stable future, the flood of new architecture in the 1950s must have thrown the loss of the old city into high relief.

Cripes.

Finally, a redesign, but sheesh! it's not finished yet. It always takes me a long time to figure out where things are and make sure everything matches. But I couldn't stand fiddling with the main page anymore... Tiny improvements will be ongoing.

>>Ok, most things are fixed. With a lot of help from Andrew, who helped me wrassle with IE until everything lined up properly. Thanks!

>>>And now that I've been able to look at the page in Windows I guess I'm really all done with it. All I can say is that IE is a big pain (it refuses to interpret the size of the banner properly). No surprise. Oh, and the fonts look a lot nicer on a Mac, also no surprise.

Cicada on the move

Another tidbit while I try to get back in the swing of writing actual posts: for those who will be missing the cicada swarms this month, a little time lapse video of a molting cicada at the Baltimore Sun. Neat. Actually, I just found a discarded case on our kitchen screen here in Austin, but then it seems like there are always a few (maybe it was a locust) around here in the summer.

>>Oops: on closer inspection, that "case" just moved and is, in fact, a so-called wood roach (or tree roach, or water bug, or Ick!), the gigundo cockroaches common to this area. Oh well.

>>>Nyeeaaah. I went around and looked at him from the front, finally, having forgotten about him for a while, and it's not a roach, but an Eyed Click Beetle. What a freaky lil dude. Haven't ever seen one of these, but luckily the fabulous index of Texas insects at A&M; is here to help identify such critters.

Nem beszélek magyarul.

So, no, I don't speak Hungarian, but it's not absolutely necessary to enjoy reklamok's (great name) collection of communist-era tv ads. 101 of them! Wow.

[via Things.]