Beginning in the late seventeenth century, aristocratic Englishmen or continental Europeans came of age and went on a Grand Tour. Lasting anything from few a months to a few years, such trips were meant directly to expose their young takers to the legacy of the Renaissance and antiquity. Naturally, most Grand Tour itineraries placed the utmost importance on Italy and Greece; some even went to the Holy Land, as satirized by Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad. By the time that book was published in 1869, the Grand Tour was out of high fashion — but a couple of decades earlier, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey had preserved many of its destinations with a piece of cutting-edge technology known as the camera.
Girault de Prangey went on his first photographic “Grand Tour” in 1841, when he was in his late thirties. Having already traveled extensively and received an education in both art and law, he was hardly a callow youth in need of refinement. But he was an aristocrat, the sole inheritor of his family fortune, and thus able to “devote his life to his passions: travel, arts, and publishing.”
So says the narrator of the Kings and Things video above, which tells the story of how Girault de Prange managed to leave us the earliest known photographs of a large swath of the world. This project “took him from Italy to Greece, Egypt, Turkey, and the Levant, he captured over 1,000 photographs, with subjects ranging from streetscapes and architectural details to nature and landscapes and portraits of local people.”
Not that photography per se was Girault de Prangey’s goal; for him, taking a picture constituted merely an early step in the creation of a drawing or painting. “Although he only intended to use them as a sort of sketch to refer to back home in his studio,” he “arranged his pictures so as to produce a sense of drama or mystery, and this artistic sensibility sets him apart from many other pioneers of photography, who were primarily technicians or inventors.” The age of the Grand Tour was ending even in Girault de Prangey’s day, but 180 years later (and about a century after their rediscovery in one of his estate’s storerooms), his photographs send us on a very different kind of trip: not just across the world, but — much more thrillingly — deep back in time as well.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The narrow “toothbrush mustache” caught on in the late nineteenth century, first in the United States and soon thereafter across the Atlantic. When Charlie Chaplin put one on for a film in 1914, he became its most famous wearer — at least until Adolf Hitler rose to prominence a couple of decades later. By that point Chaplin had become the most famous comedy star in the world, which may have inspired the Nazi Party leader, a known fan of Chaplin’s work, to adopt the same mustache as a kind of tool of self-advancement. Chaplin himself could hardly have approved of his new doppelgänger, and it troubled him to discover their other shared qualities: their births in April of 1889, their poor childhoods, their love of Wagner.
Still, as an inveterate entertainer, Chaplin grasped the comedic potential of his and Hitler’s parallel iconic status. The result, released in 1940, was The Great Dictator, his first genuine sound film. Chaplin had continued making silent pictures, and refining his signature visual humor, well into the era of “talkies.”
But he could only have done so much to ridicule Hitler, who had come to power in large part through speeches broadcast over the radio, without being able to use his voice as well. Yet he delivers his most memorable lines not in the role of Hitler surrogate Adenoid Hynkel, but that of the unnamed Jewish barber who — through, of course, several absurd turns of events — ends up mistaken for Hynkel and made to address the nation.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor,” says Chaplin-as-the-Barber-as-Hynkel. “That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone — if possible — Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery.” Throughout the three-and-a-half-minute monologue, he speaks against “greed,” “cleverness,” “national barriers,” and “the hate of men”; he advocates for “kindness and gentleness,” “universal brotherhood,” “a world of reason,” and “the love of humanity.” These may not be especially precise terms, but, knowing his public well — much better, indeed, than Hitler ever knew his — Chaplin also knew just when to go broad.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In the New York of old, “one entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.” When he wrote those words, architectural historian Vincent Scully issued what has ended up as the definitive judgment of Pennsylvania Station. Or rather, of the Pennsylvania Stations: the majestic original building from 1910, as well as its utilitarian replacement that has stood in Midtown Manhattan since 1968. But then, the word “stood” doesn’t quite apply to the latter, since it resides entirely underground, below Madison Square Garden. Over the years, New Yorkers have come more and more openly to resent the Penn Station they have and lament the Penn Station they lost, which architect Michael Wyetzner introduces to us in the Architectural Digest video above.
“A conjectural reconstruction of Imperial Rome’s Baths of Caracalla of 212–216 AD,” writes New York Review of Books architecture critic Martin Filler, the original Penn Station constituted “a harmonious synthesis of two divergent and supposedly irreconcilable architectural approaches, the Classical and the industrial.”
It was commissioned by the Pennsylvania Railroad, which in the late nineteenth century was “the country’s largest business enterprise, with a budget second only to that of the federal government,” writes the New Yorker’s William Finnegan, and which at that time had a formidable engineering problem to solve: “Its tracks ended, like those of every railroad approaching New York from the west, in New Jersey, on the banks of the Hudson River. In 1900, ninety million passengers were obliged to transfer to ferries to reach Manhattan.”
To run the Pennsylvania Railroad’s tracks into the center of New York City required digging a set of tunnels under the Hudson, where, says one historian on PBS’ American Experience documentary on the rise and fall of Penn Station, “nobody thought tunnels could be built. It’s almost as though they were going to go to the moon.” The technological achievement was matched by the aesthetic: “Its main waiting room, paneled in Italian travertine, with fluted columns and coffered ceilings a hundred and fifty feet high, was the world’s largest room,” Finnegan writes. “The train shed was equally grand, with arching steel girders, staggered mezzanines, and glass-block floors that let sunlight through to the tracks. ” Like other major urban rail terminals of its era, writes Tony Judt, Penn Station “spoke directly and deliberately to the commercial ambitions and civic self-image of the modern metropolis.”
By the mid-twentieth-century, however, trains were facing aggressive competition from both the private car and the airplane, which displaced their stations from the center of modern life. “Between 1955 and 1975,” Judt writes, “a mix of antihistoricist fashion and corporate self-interest saw the destruction of a remarkable number of terminal stations.” But prospects for rail of one kind or another in America have looked up in recent years, and “we are no longer embarrassed by the rococo or neo-Gothic or Beaux-Arts excesses of the great railway stations of the industrial age and can see such edifices instead as their designers and contemporaries saw them: as the cathedrals of their age.” Hence, in New York, the preservation of Grand Central Station — as well as the bitter and protracted struggle (covered extensively in Finnegan’s New Yorker piece) over whether and how to turn the unloved Penn Station into a cathedral of our age.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Pope Francis, who’s been head of the Catholic Church for a decade now, is officially Pontiff number 266. But if you scroll through Wikipedia’s list of popes, you’ll see quite a few entries without numbers, their rows cast in a disreputable-looking darker shade of gray. The presence of several such unofficial Popes usually indicates particularly interesting times in the history of the Church, and thus the history of Western civilization itself. The new TED-Ed video above, written by medieval history professor Joëlle Rollo-Koster, tells of the only period in which three popes vied simultaneously for legitimacy. This was The Western Schism — or the Papal Schism, or the Great Occidental Schism, or the Schism of 1378.
However one labels it, “the origins of this papal predicament began in 1296, when France’s King Philip IV decided to raise taxes on the church.” So begins the narrator of the video, which animates the historical scenes he describes in the style of a medieval illuminated manuscript. (It includes many amusing details, though I haven’t managed to spot any aggressive rabbits or snails, to say nothing of butt trumpets.) Pope Boniface VIII, the Church’s leader at the time, responded with the Unam Sanctam, “a radical decree asserting the pope’s total supremacy over earthly rulers.” The clash between the two resulted in the death of Boniface, who was eventually replaced in 1305 by Clement V.
As “a French diplomat seeking peace in the war between England and his homeland,” Clement strategically moved the seat of the papacy to Avignon. Seven popes later, the papacy moved back to Italy — not long before the death of Gregory XI, the Pontiff who moved it. Out of the chaotic process of selecting his successor came Pope Urban VI, who turned out to be “a reformer who sought to limit the cardinals’ finances.” Those cardinals then “denounced Urban as a usurper” and elected Pope Clement VII to replace him. But Urban refused to relinquish his position, and in fact “entrenched himself in Rome while Clement and his supporters returned to Avignon.”
This began the schism, splitting Western Christendom between the capitals of Avignon and Rome. Each capital kept its line going, replacing popes who die and perpetuating the situation in which “European rulers were forced to choose sides as both popes vied for spiritual and political supremacy.” Only in 1409 did a group of cardinals attempt to put an end to it, electing a new pope themselves — who went unrecognized, of course, by the existing popes in Rome and Avignon. The schism went on for nearly 40 years, underscoring the alliterative truth that “even those who are supposed to be pious are prone to petty power struggles.” Most popes, like any figures of power, must feel lonely at the top — but that’s surely better than when it’s too crowded there.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Robert Walser’s last novel, Der Räuber or The Robber, came out in 1972. Walser himself had died fifteen years earlier, having spent nearly three solid decades in a sanatorium. He’d been a fairly successful figure in the Berlin literary scene of the early twentieth century, but during his long institutionalization in his homeland of Switzerland — from which he refused to return to normal life, despite his outward appearance of mental health — he claimed to have put letters behind him. As J. M. Coetzee writes in the New York Review of Books, “Walser’s so-called madness, his lonely death, and the posthumously discovered cache of his secret writings were the pillars on which a legend of Walser as a scandalously neglected genius was erected.”
This cache consisted of “some five hundred sheets of paper covered in a microscopic pencil script so difficult to read that his executor at first took them to be a diary in secret code. In fact Walser had kept no diary. Nor is the script a code: it is simply handwriting with so many idiosyncratic abbreviations that, even for editors familiar with it, unambiguous decipherment is not always possible.”
He devised this extreme shorthand as a kind of cure for writer’s block: “In a 1927 letter to a Swiss editor, Walser claimed that his writing was overcome with ‘a swoon, a cramp, a stupor’ that was both ‘physical and mental’ and brought on by the use of a pen,” writes the New Yorker’s Deirdre Foley Mendelssohn. “Adopting his strange ‘pencil method’ enabled him to ‘play,’ to ‘scribble, fiddle about.’ ”
“Like an artist with a stick of charcoal between his fingers,” Coetzee writes, “Walser needed to get a steady, rhythmic hand movement going before he could slip into a frame of mind in which reverie, composition, and the flow of the writing tool became much the same thing.” This process facilitated the transfer of Walser’s thoughts straight to the page, with the result that his late works read — and have been belatedly recognized as reading — like no other literature produced in his time. As Brett Baker at Painter’s table sees it,” Walser’s compressed prose (rarely more than a page or two) constructs full narratives than can be consumed rapidly – nearly ‘at a glance,’ as it were. Their short length allows the reader to revisit the work in detail, focusing on sentences, phrases, or words as one might examine the painted passages or marks on a canvas.”
These ultra-compressed works from the Bleistiftgebiet, or “pencil zone,” writes Foley Mendelssohn, “establish Walser as a modernist of sorts: the recycling of materials can make the texts look like collages, modernist mashups toeing the line between mechanical and personal production.” But they also make him look like the forerunner of another, later variety of experimental literature: in a longer New Yorker piece on Walser, Benjamin Kunkel proposes 1972 as a culturally appropriate year to publish The Robber, “a fitting date for a beautiful, unsummarizable work every bit as self-reflexive as anything produced by the metafictionists of the sixties and seventies.” The publication of his “microscripts,” in German as well as in translation, has ensured him an influence on writers of the twenty-first century — and not just their choice of font size.
For anyone interested in seeing a published version of Walser’s writing, see the book Microscripts, which features full-color illustrations by artist Maira Kalman.
Based in Seoul, ColinMarshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
“Fascism is a word that’s been used a great deal these last few years,” says the article pictured above (scanned in full here at the Internet Archive). “We come across it in our newspapers, we hear it in our newsreels, it comes up in our bull sessions.” Other than the part about newsreels (today’s equivalent being our social-media feeds, or perhaps the videos put before our eyes by the algorithm), these sentences could well have been published today. Some see the fascist takeover of modern-day democracies as practically imminent, while others argue that the concept itself has no meaning in the twenty-first century. But 78 years ago, when this issue of Army Talk came off the press, fascism was very much a going — and fearsome — concern.
“Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II,” writes historian Heather Cox Richardson. The mission of Army Talks, in the publication’s own words, was to help its readers “become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”
Each issue included a topic for discussion, and on March 25, 1945, that topic was fascism — or, as the headline puts it, “FASCISM!” Under that ideology, defined as “government by the few and for the few,” a small group of political actors achieves “seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” Such ruling classes “permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law. They make their own rules and change them when they choose. If you don’t like it, it’s ‘T.S.’ ”
Fascists come to power, the text explains, in times of hardship, during which they promise “everything to everyone”: land to the farmers, jobs to the workers, customers and profits to the small businessmen, elimination of small businessmen to the industrialists, and so on. When this regime “under which everything not prohibited is compulsory” inevitably fails to deliver a perfect society, things turn violent, both in the country’s internal struggles and in its conflicts with other powers. To many Americans at the time of World War II, this might seem like a wholly foreign disorder, liable to afflict only such distant lands as Italy, Japan, and Germany. But a notional American fascism would look and feel familiar, working “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’ Fascist leaders are neither stupid nor naïve. They know that they must hand out a line that ‘sells.’ ”
That someone’s always trying to sell you something in politics — and even more so in American politics — is as true in 2023 as it was in 1945. Though whoever assumed back then that “it couldn’t happen here” presumably figured that the United States was too wealthy a society for fascist temptations to gain a foothold. But even the most favorable economic fortunes can reverse, and “lots of things can happen inside of people when they are unemployed or hungry. They become frightened, angry, desperate, confused. Many, in their misery, seek to find somebody to blame. They look for a scapegoat as a way out. Fascism is always ready to provide one.” And not only fascism: political opportunists of every stripe know full well the power to be drawn from “the insecure and unemployed” looking for someone on who “to pin the blame for their misfortune” — and how easy it is to do so when no one else has a more appealing vision of the future to offer.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
French is known as the language of romance, a reputation that, whatever cultural support it enjoys, would be difficult to defend on purely linguistic grounds. But it wouldn’t be controversial in the least to call it a Romance language, which simply refers to its descent from the Latin spoken across the Roman Empire. In that category, however, French doesn’t come out on top: its 77 million speakers put it above Romanian (24 million) and Italian (67 million), but below Spanish (489 million) and Portuguese (283 million). If you know any one of these languages, you can understand at least a little of all the others, but French stands out for its relative lack of family resemblance.
“Why is acqua just eau?” asks Joshua Rudder, creator of the Youtube channel NativLang. “How are cambiar and casa related to change and chez?” He addresses the causes of these differences between modern-day French, Spanish, and Italian in the video above, which presents the historical-linguistic explanation in the form of a long and tricky recipe.
“Start preparing your ingredients 2000 years ago. Take a base of Latin,” ideally at least three centuries old. “Combine traces of Gaulish, because Celtic words will become sources of change.” Then, “gradually incorporate sound shifts, not uniformly: work them in to form a nice continuum, where the edges look distinct, but locally, it’s similar from place to place.”
This cooking session soon becomes a dinner party. Its most important attendees are the Franks next door, who come not empty-handed but bearing a few hundred Germanic words. In the fullness of time, “you might think that the sound of French would come from a single dialect in Paris. Instead, observe as it arises from social changes and urbanization, bringing together people who speak many varieties of oïl” — an old word for what Francophones now know as oui, and which now refers to the dialects spoken in the north of the country (as opposed to oc in the south) back then. Even this far into the process, we’ve come only to the point of making Middle French.
Modern French involves “a thick ganache of kingdom and colonization” spread far and wide. Subsequent “periods of revolution and Napoleon” put more touches on the languages, none of them finishing. Students of French today find themselves seated at an elaborate feast of unfamiliar sounds and rules governing those sounds, many of which may at first seem unpalatable or even indigestible. Yet some of those students will develop a taste for such linguistic fare, and even come to prefer it to the other Romance languages that go down easier. French continues to change in the twenty-first century, not least through its incorporation of askew anglicisms, yet somehow continues to remain a language apart. Therein, perhaps, lies the true meaning of vive la difference.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Helen Keller achieved notoriety not only as an individual success story, but also as a prolific essayist, activist, and fierce advocate for poor and marginalized people. She “was a lifelong radical,” writes Peter Dreier at Yes! magazine, whose “investigation into the causes of blindness” eventually led her to “embrace socialism, feminism, and pacifism.” Keller supported the NAACP and ACLU, and protested strongly against patronizing calls for her to “confine my activities to social service and the blind.” Her critics, she wrote, mischaracterized her ideas as “a Utopian dream, and one who seriously contemplates its realization indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind.”
Twenty years later she found a different set of readers treating her ideas with contempt. This time, however, the critics were in Nazi Germany, and instead of simply disagreeing with her, they added her collection of essays, How I Became a Socialist, to a list of “degenerate” books to be burned on May 10, 1933. Such was the date chosen by Hitler for “a nationwide ‘Action Against the Un-German Spirit,’” writes Rafael Medoff, to take place at German Universities—“a series of public burnings of the banned books” that “differed from the Nazis’ perspective on political, social, or cultural matters, as well as all books by Jewish authors.”
Books burned included works by Einstein and Freud, H.G. Wells, Hemingway, and Jack London, Students hauled books out of the libraries as part of the spectacle. “The largest of the 34 book-burning rallies, held in Berlin,” Medoff notes, “was attended by an estimated 40,000 people.”
Not only were these demonstrations of anti-Semitism, but their contempt for ideas appealed broadly to the Nazi philosophy of “Blood and Soil,” a nationalist caricature of rural values over a supposedly “degenerate,” polyglot urbanism. “The soul of the German people can again express itself,” declared Joseph Goebbels ominously at the Berlin rally. “These flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era; they also light up the new.”
“Some American editorial responses” before and after the burnings, “made light of the event,” remarks the United States Holocaust Museum, calling it “silly” and “infantile.” Others foresaw much worse to come. In one very explicit expression of the terrible possibilities, artist and political cartoonist Jacob Burck drew the image above, evoking the observation of 19th century German writer Heinrich Heine: “Where one burns books, one will soon burn people.” Newsweek described the events as “’a holocaust of books’… one of the first instances in which the term ‘holocaust’ (an ancient Greek word meaning a burnt offering to a deity) was used in connection with the Nazis.”
The day before the burnings, Keller also displayed a keen sense for the gravity of book burnings, as well as a “notable… early concern,” notes Rebecca Onion at Slate—outside the Jewish community, that is—for what she called the “barbarities to the Jews.” On May 9, 1933, Keller published a short but pointed open letter to the Nazi students in TheNew York Times and elsewhere, abjuring them to stop the proposed burnings. She wrote in a religious idiom, invoking the “judgment” of God and paraphrasing the Bible. (Not a traditional Christian, she belonged to a mystical sect called Swedenborgianism.) At the top of the post, you can see the typescript of her letter, with corrections and annotations by Polly Thompson, one of her primary aides. Read the full transcript below:
To the student body of Germany:
History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them.
You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds. I gave all the royalties of my books for all time to the German soldiers blinded in the World War with no thought in my heart but love and compassion for the German people.
I acknowledge the grievous complications that have led to your intolerance; all the more do I deplore the injustice and unwisdom of passing on to unborn generations the stigma of your deeds.
Do not imagine that your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here. God sleepeth not, and He will visit His judgment upon you. Better were it for you to have a mill-stone hung around your neck and sink into the sea than to be hated and despised of all men.
Keller added the penultimate paragraph of the published text later. (See the handwritten addition at the bottom of the typed draft.) Her concern for the “grievous complications” of the German people was certainly genuine. The expression also seems like a targeted rhetorical move for a student audience, conceding the situation as “complex,” and appealing in more philosophical language to “justice” and “wisdom.” The Nazis ignored her protest, as they did the “massive street demonstrations” that took place on the 10th “in dozens of American cities,” the Holocaust Museum writes, “skillfully organized by the American Jewish Congress” and sparking “the largest demonstration in New York City history up to that date.”
Five years later, however, another planned book burning—this time in Austria before its annexation—was prevented by students at Williams College, Yale, and other universities in the U.S., where pro- and anti-Nazi partisans fought each other on several American campuses. U.S. students were able to push the Austrian National Library to lock the books away rather than burn them. Keller “is not known to have commented specifically” on these student protests, writes Medoff, “but one may assume she was deeply proud that at a time when too many Americans did not want to be bothered with Europe’s problems, these young men and women understood the message of her 1933 letter—that the principles under attack by the Nazis were something that should matter to all mankind.”
Note: This post originally appeared on our site in 2017.
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