Somehow I missed this the first time around, but shouldn't these people be working with these people? And these people? So many links I could add...
At h-soz-u-kult, Jörg Arnold has published a lengthy review of 28 (!) recent books dealing with localized accounts of the Allied air war. According to the reviewer these are books spawned by the success of Friedrich's Der Brand, offering documentation of the destruction of various cities, including photographs and quotations from eyewitnesses, rather than any historical analysis. As such they are reviewed "nicht in erster Linie als Beiträge zur wissenschaftlichen Forschung ...sondern als Indikatoren der gegenwärtigen Erinnerungskultur..."
[I was thinking that this might make an interesting context against which to understand the (near) completion of the restoration of Dresden's Frauenkirche.]
Yesterday the dome was put in place on Dresden's Frauenkirche. Their website is (understandably) slow at the moment, but it might be worth waiting on to see some views of the completed reconstruction. It's impressive.
I should be saying something about the significance of the recreated wholeness of this building in the context of the [left's?] new understanding of Allied bombing and German victimhood, but I don't have a thesis yet. Not an easy thing to think through, certainly.
Some related resources: Charles Maier's H-Net review of Jörg Friedrich's Der Brand—and the whole H-Net forum on WWII bombing.
[Update: Ionarts has responded with a nice overview of the history and some good image links.]
Moe exlains the advantages of unabbreviated RSS feeds [In German, but I'm sure there's others writing this in English]. It seems logical enough to me--as much as I like seeing what people have done with their blogs in terms of design, I do most of my reading in Bloglines. It's much nicer when the entire post, pictures and all, is there in the window. Just some food for thought.
Now it's no secret that I am behind the times a bit; but if you have not yet read fafblog, I so pity you and command you to get on it right away.
Might not be yer type of humor. But it is mine. And they are all right, those kids over there at fafblog.
Cat observation: training Tiny to use a litterbox will not be easy. It's been sitting here, ready to be used, for weeks, but she's only ever put one very tentative foot in it, mostly to feel the texture. A few minutes ago, she curled up in the box to take a nap (but got up when I went for the camera). At least it hasn't been used yet.
[again I promise this will not become a cat blog.]
We were on vacation for a week in Oregon. I have so much to say about the trip, but for now I will keep it brief: it's beautiful there and I hope to get back again soon. It was thirty degrees cooler (sometime more) than here in Austin, so the fact that I couldn't get into the icy waters of the Pacific didn't matter too much. I just enjoyed the general break from heat and sun. Oh, and the way people have adjusted to the wet, cool weather: I've never seen so many rural coffee shacks...
Now the drudgery of everyday life begins again. Luckily the cat stayed around and she's here helping me get my desk cleaned off. Because she's not technically domesticated yet, we were worried that she would take off while we were gone; but our neighbor provided food and contact, and she's right back where we left her. She even took a brief snooze with me on the bed. This is significant because she hasn't really come to understand the bed as something you get up onto and then stay on. Especially when there are legs moving underneath covers. Freaks her out pretty badly.
So I guess things are back as they were. It was only a week, after all...
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.]
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.]
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.]
