Brad Nelson
Administrator
עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
Posts: 12,238
|
Post by Brad Nelson on May 24, 2020 11:31:33 GMT -8
Going through some of my father’s old books, I came across a two-set volume titled “Patterns for Living.” It’s a collection of various works and poetry, some by people I’ve actually heard of (Hemingway, Chesterton). And it was certainly meant for the well-educated or those who wished to be well-educated. In my father’s day, being an uncouth dumb-ass was still just a gleam in the Socialists’ eyes.
The copyright is 1935. This particularly edition is the fifteen printing from 1947.
I opened one of the books at random and landed on a poem by Ernst Toller, who is apparently, according to Wiki, a “German leftwing playwright . . . He was imprisoned for five years for his part in the armed resistance by the Soviet Republic to the central government in Berlin.” So he was obviously a bastion of virtue.
This poem is near the end of his play titled: No More Peace! A Thoughtful Comedy by Ernst Toller (1956). The poem reads:
Now the day is done,
And the feverish sorrow
In the heart of man
Sleeps until tomorrow
Bounded is the sea—
And the earth is small.
Man’s stupidity
Has no bounds at all. (Says the Commie-loving leftist)
And it goes on but I won’t bore you further. I just wondered if anyone had heard of this two-volume book or this author.
|
|
|
|
Post by timothylane on May 24, 2020 11:48:12 GMT -8
Toller's name is vaguely familiar, like someone I encountered somewhere in my reading. Perhaps Shirer mentioned him in one of his books. Maybe wikipedia has some further details that I'll recognize. The books I don't recognize at all.
I see that Toller played an important role in the Bavaria rebel regime, so no doubt I encountered his name in reading about it, most likely (as I suggested) in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
|
|
|
|
Post by kungfuzu on May 24, 2020 17:25:25 GMT -8
I tried to find Toller's poem in its original German, but could not. I am sure if I were willing to spend more time on this, I could find it, but time is too precious.
From what I can see, Toller was another one of the many left-wing cranks who seemed to sprout from the ground in Central and Eastern Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of them are, thank God, forgotten, but some are still held in high esteem by the left.
It is my contention that much of what these oddballs wrote is considered worthwhile or great art simply because they opposed the Nazis. But to my mind, that is like saying Burger King is good because it is in competition with McDonalds. In fact, they are both rubbish.
Toller was lucky not to have been executed after his April 1919 foray into revolutionary politics. His role in the Bavarian Soviet did not last many days before he was pushed aside by Eugen Levine a full bore Commie/Bolshevik, who had received Lenin's OK to take over in Munich.
I believe that the high-profile roles played by many Jews in post-war German revolutionary politics was a tragedy. Kurt Eisner declared Bavaria a People's Republic and threw out the Wittelsbach's who had ruled Bavaria for centuries. Then came Toller, Gustave Landauer, Erich Muehsam, Eugen Levine and others who used violence to try and achieve their ends. This was on top of what was happening in the rest of the country, especially the attempt of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg to take over Berlin. Revolutions are traumatic enough without being foisted on the common folk by an ethnic minority. Strong push back is to be expected.
It should be remembered that Hitler had lived in Munich before the war and had close ties to the city. He returned to Munich in late 1918 and experienced the chaos which was taking place all through 1919. It was later in 1919 that he first wrote down his thoughts on the "Jewish Question" and we all know where that led.
|
|
Brad Nelson
Administrator
עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
Posts: 12,238
|
Post by Brad Nelson on May 24, 2020 17:48:42 GMT -8
So I take it, Mr. Flu, you don’t find patterns for living in central European commie scum? Well, my father liked it (his name is written inside the cover). And if central (or eastern) European scum was good enough for him, then by god it’s good enough for me.
Here’s a list of authors included in volume one. Let’s see if some others might set a better pattern:
+ Arnold Bennett
+ Albert Halper
+ Jonathan Mitchell
+ Robert Louis Stevenson (Walking Tours)
+ The New Yorkers (The New Yorkers? Any relation to The New Yorker magazine, I wonder?)
+ Hugo Münsterberg (sounds like a proper Kraut)
+ Mark Twain (Early Days from his autobiography)
+ Marcel Praust
+ Willa Cather
+ Joseph Conrad (Man Against the Sea — from Typhoon)
+ Rupert Brooke (wonder why the name “Rupert” ever went out of style)
+ John Keats
+ John Gould Fletcher
+ Wilfred Gibson
+ A. E. Housman
+ Robert Herrick
+ Andrew Marvell
+ Archibald MacLeish
+ Alfred Lord Tennyson
+ William Wordsworth
+ Robert Frost
+ Robert Browning
And it goes on for another nine pages of contributors. But it looks as if they’re not all central (or eastern) European Commie scum.
|
|
|
|
Post by kungfuzu on May 24, 2020 18:13:42 GMT -8
But I don't see many central or eastern European commie-scum names. Looks pretty Anglo-Saxon to me, which is as it should be.
|
|
|
|
Post by timothylane on May 24, 2020 19:06:50 GMT -8
I'm curious how Brad got an umlaut in there. We could do umlauts, accents, and cedillas at ST but the same method doesn't work here.
Of course, most of the listed names are familiar as names that I've read at least something by. In some cases they may even be some of the same items listed. That doesn't include Marcel Proust (I assume Marcel Praust was a typo), but does include Victory (in senior English) by Joseph Conrad, who of course was actually Polish. Certainly there was a lot of literary talent represented in the two books. (I'm not sure we had anything by Robert Louis Stevenson in class, but I have read both Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.)
|
|
Brad Nelson
Administrator
עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
Posts: 12,238
|
Post by Brad Nelson on May 25, 2020 8:39:22 GMT -8
Hey, if these "Patterns for Living" books interest you, Timothy, let me know and they're yours. I would just need an address to send them to. The umlaut was accomplished via a utility on my iMac called Character Viewer. It makes it easy to insert all manners of characters. It looks like this: Umlaut.pdf (55.4 KB) |
|
|
|
Post by artraveler on May 25, 2020 13:40:22 GMT -8
Looks pretty Anglo-Saxon to me, which is as it should be. Looks a lot like my library kindle and hard copy versions. And of course, it is not politically correct all those white Western European men, not one gay Mexican nun, on a unicycle, spouting off lickey split and burning a bra. |
|
|
|
Post by timothylane on May 26, 2020 7:30:03 GMT -8
Well, this does involve poetry, and Brad certainly should appreciate it. The Calvin and Hobbes rerun today features -- an alliterative haiku by Calvin. The link is:
|
|
Brad Nelson
Administrator
עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
Posts: 12,238
|
Post by Brad Nelson on May 26, 2020 7:37:38 GMT -8
A welcome wandering from wearisome Wuhan wackiness worldwide with Watterson.
|
|
|
|
Post by kungfuzu on May 26, 2020 8:22:13 GMT -8
My wife gave me this set for Christmas some years back. At the time, it was three volumes, not four. It is a beautiful set.
|
|
Brad Nelson
Administrator
עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
Posts: 12,238
|
Post by Brad Nelson on May 26, 2020 8:54:01 GMT -8
That's a very nice boxed set. And pricey!
|
|
|
|
Post by timothylane on May 26, 2020 9:05:34 GMT -8
I didn't have anything quite like that (at least with comic strip books), but I did have a lot of collections of comic strips, including Calvin and Hobbes and Foxtrot (which once referred to a strip called Luther and Locke) as well as many others. (I think I had complete collections of Gahan Wilson and Charles Addams cartoons.) That's what happens when your house is furnished mainly with bookcases -- and there are still large stacks of books on tables and floors, and even some on the stairways.
|
|
Brad Nelson
Administrator
עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
Posts: 12,238
|
Post by Brad Nelson on May 26, 2020 9:13:59 GMT -8
This strip is prominently on my wall, just to the upper left of my computer screen:  |
|
|
|
Post by timothylane on May 26, 2020 10:23:29 GMT -8
In some of my courses at Purdue, that's sort of how I did my programming, at least for things that looked like they should be easy. It didn't work out very well.
|
|
