Yuletide blog

I wrote in 2017 about the film All Quiet on the Western Front [1930], which I rewatched recently in honor of the centenary of the end of the 1914-1918 war

(See also Post-365: Scenes from the End of the Great War, Plus 100 Years.)

Scene from All Quiet on the Western Front, WWI film

The 1930 film was based on a 1929 novel, Im Westen Nichts Neues ([lit. "In the West, Nothing New [to Report]") by a German veteran of the 1914-1918 war. The book was a major hit of its time.

A June 1930 printing, English translation ("All Quiet on the Western Front") was among my grandfather's books, and it is the rediscovery of it that is inspiration for this post.

Aged a not quite ninety years, here is the book as it appears today:

My grandfather died in the late 1990s but his books and other papers and files remained intact until the 2010s (as my aunt continued to reside in the house) at which time I was able to discover many of them, preserved as they were twenty years or so before, some from decades earlier still.

The oldest few books in the house I believe belonged to my grandfather's grandfather [1857-1917], which I base on years of publication, subject matter, language, and especially the font used (a few of the oldest volumes use that awful font called Fraktur). Some of the books were those my grandfather bought himself. Others somehow ended up, this way or that way, over the decades, at the house (which my grandfather, his wife, daughters, and other relatives lived in from the 1940s through the 1990s), as in those from relatives. This copy of All Quiet on the Western Front is one of those. It originally belonged to George Kosswig, my grandfather's brother.

Now, I think this is a great discovery not because it is a rare book (which it is not; it would be easy to find for free in any library, and probably without difficulty online for free somewhere in PDF form, in a pinch, if you really want the text). It is rather, I would say, an example of a "time capsule" in book form.

This book-as-time-capsule idea came to me suddenly to me from the inner cover of this copy of All Quiet. Luckily for us here in the future, my great-uncle wrote his name and date of acquisition on the inner cover, fixing it at a point in time.

Original copy of All Quiet on the Western Front (1929 English translation). It seems it was acquired by my grandfather's brother George W. Kosswig [1911-2005] when he was 19, in July 1930. They were both lifelong Connecticut residents. Found among the book possessions of my grandfather in the 2010s.

Actual time capsules work on a similar principle: They are a slice of "the present" hidden away, with ordinary items from a specific date contributed by specific people, not to be looked at again for x number of years, with the idea that when it is re-opened, it will be instructive to the people of the future, a gift of the present to the future. (Speaking of which, at about age eight I contributed some baseball cards to an Arlington time capsule, but I don't remember where it was deposited or when it is to be opened...)

And so that handwritten inscription, on the inner cover, is the inspiration for this post.

I went through several conceptualizations of this, but what it has turned out to be is a look back at the 1914-1918 war, "through" 1930 (the time of book acquisition) "from" 2018 (the time of this writing) (really from the 1990s to 2010s, my own life memories, experiences/memories of people involved, family history research, and understanding of history).

We inevitably have imperfect information about the past, because we weren't there. We may have some kind of information, with varying degrees of reliability, but we lack first-hand experience; even those who do have first-hand experience may not remember key things, decades later.

An item like a book can be useful here to signal or "signpost" the way towards a little portrait of the owner/reader/purchaser at the specific moment in time he/she possessed it. I think this one does that. Hence Book-as-Time-Capsule.

For this book-as-time-capsule idea to work, of course, we need supplementary or background information.

What was going on in 1930?

For one thing, here is what the George Kosswig's younger brother, my grandfather Ernest Kosswig, looked like at the time (picture taken at his confirmation, about 1930). (Note also that this picture was taken about sixty-seven years before the first Harry Potter book came out:)

So what else was going on in 1930? Motion pictures had recently started up, with full soundtracks of spoken dialogue. One of the most successful of these early "talking pictures" was All Quiet on the Western Front, filmed in late 1929 and 1930. It premiered in some U.S. cities in the middle months of 1930, and had a general U.S. release in all markets in August 1930. It won Best Picture for year 1930. It remains a powerful movie to watch even in the 2010s.

That is one thing we can immediately conclude: July 31, 1930, was just weeks before the film's nationwide U.S. premier. George Kosswig, my great-uncle, was "in on" the wave of interest in this book at the height of its popularity. Did he buy it or was it given to him as a gift (it was not his birthday)? I cannot be sure.

The book's popularity pre-dated the hype surrounding the movie, though. The book's sales success was immediate following its Jan. 1929 publication in German(y), where it sold hundreds of thousands of copies in its first weeks. It had been partially serialized in a newspaper in November and December 1928.

It is notable that it quickly sold very well across all the Western, former belligerent countries. These numbers I find in an essay by Hilton Tims, in a book of essays about the novel, called Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (Harold Bloom, ed.) [Link] (p. 158):

Over 1 million copies sold in Germany by Dec. 1929; a second million German copies sold by July 1930 (according to an article in the Irish Times)
300,000 copies sold in France by about late spring 1930;
300,000 copies sold in Britain by early 1930;
215,000 copies sold in the USA by spring 1930; reaching 300,000 copies sold by June 1930 (according to the first essay in World War II, Film, and History, "The Anti-War Film and the Image of Modern War," by John Whiteclay Chambers, p.14).

Kriegsschuldfrage

By 1929-1930, when the book and then film came out in succession, the academic consensus on war origins (the Kriegsschuldfrage debates [Krieg: War; Schuld: Guilt; Frage: Question]) had been resolved with the so-called Revisionists decisively winning. They rejected the argument of unique German war guilt. That is, the international historians' consensus by the mid-to-late 1920s was that the argument for unique German war guilt for the 1914 war was definitely incorrect, and not an innocent mistake but a malicious one (based, understandably in a sense, on wartime propaganda and power politics).

It was a more honest age in many ways, as the capitals involved in the 1914 disaster largely released their internal files in the years after 1918 for scholars to look at. Thorough investigations of these diplomatic documents, as they were released in the early 1920s, proved to the satisfaction of most historians of the world that Germany [was] Not Guilty in 1914 -- the title of one of the Revisionist books of this era. The consensus became rather than a single malicious actor that it was a tragedy caused by foolish behavior all around, a systemic problem and not a good-guy-bad-guy morality play. This understanding has held the mainstream position ever since.

(The reason the Kriegsschuldfrage was so significant in the 1920s was that German war guilt was written into the 1919 Peace Treaty; among the consequences of the war guilt clause was the onerous, hyperinflation-causing reparations system; that and other conditions many viewed as undermining longterm peace. The argument of unique German war guilt had never been valid, it turned out, which turned the historians' controversy into a political one, and many steps to reduce the reparations burden were taken after the Revisionists' decisive academic victory.)

In 1994, Henry Kissinger [b.1923] would use the phrase "a Political Doomsday Machine: European Diplomacy Before the First World War" as the title of his chapter on the 1914 war's origins, in his 900-page Diplomacy. (The next chapter was "Into the Vortex: The Military Doomsday Machine." Both are references, I think, to Dr. Strangelove.)

(A side note on the book design: Notice the author's name is in larger font that the book title.)

Kissinger wrote in 1994: "No one country can be singled out for that mad dash to disaster [i.e., in July-August 1914]," which endorsed directly and explicitly for academic posterity, from his authoritative position, the Revisionist victory of the 1920s.

Kissinger would have started coming into cultural-political consciousness in the early 1930s, in the immediate wake of the Kriegsschuldfrage.

Reconciliation

I think it's fair to say that by 1930, anger over the war was past; reconciliation had been achieved as evidenced by the international consensus on the war guilt question. All Quiet on the Western Front burst onto the scene in this context, which is probably a key to its international success.

When my own cultural-political consciousness began to emerge in 1990s USA, the 1914-1918 war occupied at best a minor place in the pantheon of events which we are supposed to remember and through which we are supposed to understand the world.

The 1914-1918 war narrative seems to have been "puppetized" by the 1939-1945 war narrative, the earlier war made to serve the latter war's purposes in popular historical memory, which represents a net loss of historical understanding of that which prevailed in 1930. I have come to what I think is a now-common understanding, that the 1914-1918 war caused Western Man to lose something that I don't think we have regained in the 100 years that have followed. (Maybe the next hundred will be better, but it looks likely to get worse before it gets better.)

It is not a surprise, given the reconciliation achieved by 1930, that the film was produced and treats the German soldier (civilian-soldier) so relatively sympathetically. I know of no Hollywood movie from my lifetime that treats the German soldier sympathetically. Nothing like this from any era of German history, despite plenty of good material to draw from over 2,000 years. The film is, by that merit, a time capsule of its own right: A present-day White American watching this 1930 U.S. film is liable to be surprised that a U.S.-produced, major, award-winning film like this shows the German soldier sympathetically.

The war itself is depicted as a kind of natural disaster, rather than a heroic fight against an enemy (we never see or hear the enemy speak). I believe this is All Quiet's strength as a film. We see the protagonists as civilians and soldiers -- first as the one, then as the other -- but the two roles never quite separate: They are civilian-soldiers, the same as the French they are fighting (we do see a single French soldier in one scene but he doesn't speak). It seems to me that is what getting over war and returning to peace is all about: Re-stressing the civilian part and de-stressing the soldier part, of "civilian-soldier."

As to the fate of those unfortunate millions of civilian-soldiers, Remarque ends his preface with the words; "A generation of men...were destroyed by the war."

Publication page and preface to All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

How many were destroyed by the war?

Looking at Germany alone: Different sources I find say that Germany mobilized between 11 and 13 million men, out of a total male population of about 33 million in 1914 [all ages]. This means that a very large majority of able-bodied 18-to-50-year-olds were mobilized.

The military casualties:

Germany lost 1.8 to 2.0 million military dead [14-18% of all mobilized] -- of which comparatively few seem to have died of the mystery Influenza epidemic. (That virus killed just over one percent of all mobilized U.S. troops in the war, the highest rate of any army due I think to bad timing, as U.S. forces were highly concentrated in training camps, bases, and cross-Atlantic transit ships during the peak of the pandemic's worst wave in 1918, allowing it to spread rapidly);
4.2 million German soldiers were wounded at least once [32-38% of all mobilized], of whom many recovered and returned to the front. But 2.7 million [21-25% of all mobilized] were wounded enough to claim and receive disability benefits from the postwar government. This does not, as far as I know, include the 700,000 taken out of service at some point in 1918 after coming down with the Spanish Influenza [Wever and van Bergen, 2014]. Some speculate that the timing of the mid-1918 Influenza wave may have been decisive in ensuring the loss of the the German Army's strategic coordinator Ludendorff's final attempt to win the war in the middle months of 1918: The Influenza put hundreds of thousands of sorely-needed veteran German troops in sickbeds and not at the front at the height of these summer offensives whereas with them, they could have broken through and taken Paris after all; so the argument goes (I am skeptical...);
Over a million Germans were captured and became POWs [9-10% of all mobilized],
Summary of Military Casualties: Accounting for the range of estimates, between one half and two-thirds of all men under arms for the Kaiserreich in 1914-1918 became casualties in one way or another, with at least 35% killed or seriously wounded (eligible for disability payments).

Civilian losses:

0.8%-1.4% of German civilians died of malnutrition due primarily to the wartime British naval blockade;
Another 0.5% of German civilians died of the 1918-1919 Influenza pandemic of unknown origin (far lower than the worldwide average said to be 3%).
But the biggest demographic shock of the war was not the millions dying from shells and bullets, the troubling reports of blockade-induced starvation, or the Spanish Influenza, but the alarming crash in the birthrate that led to a birth-deficit in the millions. The 1915-1919 birth deficit was not made up for by any significant post-war baby boom in Germany. These can be counted as millions more losses (3.2 million, estimated by Vandenbroucke [2012]). The same dramatic birth slump also held for France and I presume other belligerents.

So the German baby deficit for 1915-1919 exceeds military dead by a large margin.

I believe this is a good metaphor for the civilizational effect of that war: Major disruption causing a loss in hope for the future, a kind of metaphor for which is the millions never born at all. (Three of my grandparents were born in this time range in the USA; had their parents been under a comparable birth-crash situation -- an abrupt halving of the pre-war birth rate, it means that there a one-in-two chance a baby that "should have been born" in normal circumstances would not have been born -- if this situation had prevailed in the USA, it seems likely I would never have existed at all; in terms of probability, I would need to flip three heads in a row, a 12.5% chance, for all three of my grandparents born in those years to have actually been born.)

The baby deficit is illustrated here:

Millions of babies were never born due to the shock of WWI, here quantified by Vandenbroucke (2012)

Fortunately, the war finally ended on November 11, 1918.

It is said that nearly seven million men were on German military active duty, in uniform, on November 11, 1918; their uniforms presumably still largely in passable shape even as the regime that issued them had been fraying apart for weeks. In the days before November 11, the regime had received mortal wounds at home: Mutinies, Marxist uprisings, the overthrow of the monarchy.

The seven million returned home over the coming months ("Never Defeated," as the somewhat caricature-inspiring General Ludendorff wrote again and again in rightist periodicals throughout the 1920s). Some of them famously took to political streetfighting against Marxists, whom some veterans blamed for a late-war "Stab in the Back" (Dolchstoss).

Germany, from world-leader in the arts, sciences, and technology, from awe-inspiring economy, from beaming with cultural-political optimism, from the centuries-old tradition of Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers), to gangs of communists slugging it out with gangs of militant rightists, all within five years...

"The Land of Poets and Thinkers" (Goethe and Schiller statues in Weimar)

All these dead, the demographic hit, the political and cultural disruptions, were all for nothing. There was no need for any general war in 1914. Diplomatic crises far more significant than the one of June-July 1914 had, in the same era, and in all eras, been resolved without war.

Back to All Quiet on the Western Front, the semi-fictionalized novel and view of the war from a Frontsoldat's perspective. The book itself in 1929/1930 was already a time capsule on one level, a picture of life circa a dozen years earlier for the typical European young man. Ninety years later, it remains valid as such.

One good thing about paper-books is that they are final. The paper-book is as a frozen moment of time. A monument built of some solid material on a hilltop, rather than a beach sand castle built within the reach of tide, that is, not subject to ongoing "review" or loss in the way that material on the Internet is.

To use another metaphor, the paper-book is the kind of "engraving on a stone tablet" we speak of proverbially; the Internet, in a parallel metaphor, would be the following set of things: A mishmash of lumps of clay around a confusing array of conveyor belts going off in all directions, with spare writing tools to make marks in the clay laying around; the clay is always malleable and often washed away; the conveyor belts sometimes lead to furnaces that solidify whatever etchings a passerby makes in the clay into 'stone' that could last years or decades, while most conveyor belts lead to oblivion; it is difficult to tell which conveyor belt is which. (Most of what I have ever written on the Internet is already lost forever; this small website itself is now five years old and even in that short time has become littered with dead links due to various issues including URL changes.)

To get around to addressing my main point: My grandfather's brother (George)'s acquisition of the book on July 31, 1930 (a Thursday) happens to have landed on a metaphorical conveyor belt that has transported it safely into my hands, ninety years later.

The book raises a question that I think I can answer:

Thursday, July 31, 1930

The question is: Why does he end up with this book in 1930?

To answer this question in a full-on way is exactly the value of this book-as-time-capsule / historical signpost.

This is the answer: All Quiet, as a work of anti-war German literature, nestled itself right at a confluence of three different "family traditions," as I see it, making it completely natural that this book ends up in 19-year-old George Kosswig's hands, possibly a gift from his father or another relative. The three family traditions are contained in the three words I used to describe the book there: Anti-War; German; and Literature.

To take these three "family traditions" one at a time:

[1] Pro-Literature. There was, by 1930, a long tradition of devotion to the printed word in this family, ever since the first Kosswig ancestor on whom I have any information [b. 1857] left the village of his birth along the Saale River, a tributary of the Elbe, about the early 1870s. He got involved in bookbinding as an apprentice in Leipzig in the newly declared German Empire (sometimes called the Kaisserreich). (A 19th-century young man probably ends up around printing because of a pre-existing family orientation towards the printed word; I fully expect that earlier Kosswigs were probably not just literate but enthusiastic readers despite likely limited funds, like the young Lincoln is said to have been.)

This ancestor Kosswig passed on this publishing-oriented trade to his son, who worked in printing in the 1900s and 1910s in Connecticut.

And the interest in books and reading/writing was certainly inherited by my grandfather Ern Kosswig, who was for decades a small-time hobby writer and definitely a reader (I witnessed him read the Civil War novel Killer Angels in one sitting one summer day in the 1990s). Among other endeavors, in the 1970s he attempted to publish a comedic novel he wrote, told from the perspective of a group of anthropomorphic ants who humorously observe human behavior (in the 1990s, two animated movies very similar to his novel came out). That he kept so many books for so many decades, never dumping them as old and useless, also speaks for itself.

Being that All Quiet on the Western Front had literary value, it would have appealed to this family. Here is the first page for good measure. Its literary value is said to be its highly realist style, now seemingly characteristic of early 20th-century writing but then something new, a departure from lofty 19th-century style writing (Hemingway would do the same around the same time in the USA):

[2] Anti-War. This is something I discovered, amid the documents at my grandfather's house, that I had not been really aware of at all from any kind of personal impression. There was more than a bit of a family political tradition of non-militarism and interest in the anti-war movements (if not strictly pacifism), certainly so in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

My grandfather recorded in an autobiographical essay that his German-born grandfather was involved in this kind of politics. I discovered one of the oldest books in the collection prominently featured essays from circa 1905 by a Karl Kautsky, a leading Social Democratic or Socialist figure of the German-speaking world at the time (Kautsky would come out strongly against the Bolshevik terror-state that was being set up in Russia in the late 1910s and 1920s, and was condemned at length by Lenin).

Another book I found in the house is one I expect my grandfather inherited from his father or possibly from his grandfather. It is an extended polemic against imperialism, war-mongering, war-industry/profiteering, and militarism generally, called War, What For? published in 1912. (The much-later song "War, What is It Good For?" [1970] I presume has such a similar name by coincidence only, but who knows.) I have paged through some of this 1912 book. It must have been an obscure book for its time, but you can't argue that the author was wrong; that is, the author didn't need to wait long to say "I told you so," as the 1914-1918 disaster was just around the corner...;

All Quiet on the Western Front's war-as-tragedy theme would have fit right in this family tradition; even though of course sons and grandsons do not share the same politics as fathers and grandfathers, the tradition is there.

[3] German Identity. The Kosswig family in Connecticut was of (relatively) recent German origin as of 1930. Patrilineally, I believe the ancestors of past generations would have had primary allegiance to the former Kingdom of Saxony in that state's heyday (hey-centuries?) and probably retained a feeling of Saxon identity through the 19th century, when a variety of successor entities came about on the margins, starting with map-rearrangement organized by Napoleon, then by the Concert of Europe, and finally Prussia. My grandfather's grandfather and other ancestors on whom I have information were born Prussian subjects but were still very close to the Saxony line.

From a big picture perspective, the Kosswig and related ancestors seem to be from the region immediately west of Leipzig.

This was the heart of Germany at the time. In the early 20th century, planners built one of the world's largest train stations at Leipzig because it was considered geographically right in the center of Germany, making for most efficient cross-country transfers. It was from this city (Leipzig) that the Kosswig ancestor had lived in through 1887, when he came to the USA.

So as of 1930, the Kosswig line had been in the U.S. for only forty-some years. There was a relatively strong connection to German cultural and religious traditions, including everyone being involved in the Lutheran church (my grandfather recorded an incident that stuck with him in which he and a boy were punished for playing marbles during the church service), and the first Kosswig male ancestor being one of the founders of the New Britain (Connecticut) Quartette Club (a German singing group).

A lot of German language was spoken, as well, but by 1930 the younger people didn't quite have a native ability in it, and my grandfather once wrote that his parents would speak English together, except when they wanted to keep something semi-secret from the kids, at which time they would switch to German.

I figure I need to include a visual here: Below is my grandparents' wedding picture. The two men in the middle of the picture are my grandfather Ern (smiling, facing my grandmother) and his older brother George, whose book has inspired this long post:

As for the 1910s itself, how would the Kosswigs in Connecticut have reacted to the 1914-1918 war during the debate over U.S. involvement?

This family and those in its immediate vicinity would have been (and I have no doubt about this) totally against U.S. intervention, including against U.S. financing of the British/French side through loans, and against the selling of war materiel thereto (both of which occurred).

(The consensus among experts, I have read, is that such a position was the clear the majority one in the USA in 1914, 1915, and through 1916, with popular opinion perhaps moving towards favor of intervention only in early 1917 with the leaking of the Zimmermann Telegram offering Mexico an alliance if the U.S. intervened against Germany [January 1917; apparently endorsed publicly by German foreign ministry March 3, 1917] and with the declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare [Feb. 1, 1917].)

The family would have been against the out-of-the-blue rebranding of Germany (or of "the Kaiser") as some kind of major U.S. enemy. As for the Kaiser, they were not likely fans; the onerous "political police" of the German Empire in the 1880s appear likely to have been responsible for the Kosswig ancestor's decision to leave Germany in 1887 (what evidence I have seen suggests he may have been co-convicted under the anti-Socialist Law for involvement in publishing proscribed material, and levied with a heavy fine).

The Kosswigs and related families in the period before April 1917 would have said that to go to war in Europe for little apparent U.S. national-interest would be to take up the same poison chalice that the major powers in Europe had taken up in 1914. Kool-Aid was invented in 1927, and the Jim Jones mass suicide event was in 1978, but if this phrasing had been around, they would have said that to go to war at that time in those circumstances would be to "drink the Kool-Aid," in the suicidal sense (i.e., leading to the kinds of major demographic and cultural disruptions that the statistics above and subsequent history bear out).

"This war is one of the most evil things to which we have sacrificed ourselves." --Franz Marc, painter, killed at Verdun.

In short, I am sure the members of this and related families would have seen the 1914-1918 war as a tragedy for all three of the reasons above, which tie back into All Quiet and what George Kosswig and others may have been thinking about the novel in 1930.

As I am not sure I have fully achieved my goal here yet, let me attempt to to end this post by tying these three themes directly back to both 1914-1918 and 1930 with All Quiet on the Western Front :

[1] Literacy: In 1914-1918, I believe the Kosswigs and related families would have seen the war as a net loss for Western civilization and thus a net loss for intellectual pursuit like the written word.

In one of the opening scenes of All Quiet (the film), we see the high school boys who had just decided to enlist together en masse proceed to gleefully rip apart their textbooks and toss the pages carelessly around the classroom in celebration, certainly a deliberate metaphor. In a later scene, a student-turned-soldier during a rear-area respite quotes some mathematical principle he had learned to an older, not-academically-oriented member of the unit, asking him whether or not he too found that mathematical principle to be fascinating. It is a pearls-before-swine moment as the older soldier replies: "What do you wanna learn that stuff for? One day you'll stop a bullet and it'll all be worthless."

Ironically (or not), a major literary success came out of the war. But the author, who (in real life) was wounded during his frontline mission laying barbed wire and spent months hospitalized, could just as easily have died of his wounds, and that literary contribution would have been snuffed out before it ever emerged. Hence the tragedy of the loss of so many millions to civilization itself.

Consider also this: "Whereas, according to an Italian source, 330 out of 1,000 recruits entering its army were illiterate, the corresponding ratios were 220/1,000 in Austria-Hungary, 68/1,000 in France, and an astonishing 1/1,000 in Germany." (From Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, ch. 5).

[2] Anti-War: In 1914-1918, the political and cultural tragedy of fighting senseless modern wars for the benefit of empires and other big-money interests (as many anti-war voices saw it) would have been why not to get involved; in 1930, the anti-war feeling of the earlier era and of the book may have still resonated, especially if George's father bought and gave him the book.

[3] German Ancestry: In the 1914-1918 period, besides some inevitable sympathy for those extended family members in Germany and for the German nation as a whole, there would have considerable worry about the negative impact a major U.S. war effort against Germany would have on German cultural life in the USA.

The major success of All Quiet, a story told sympathetically from the German common soldier's perspective and which does not "bash" Germans really in any way, would have been appealing to this family as of 1930, by which time general reconciliation had occurred and German identity had partially recovered from its low ebb of 1917-1918. (There is really only one character who is really bashed in the film depiction: A peacetime mailman the boys know who becomes a cruel drill instructor; but even he is ultimately harmless and dealt with in a prank by the boys.)

Th German-American Council, circa late 1930s

To jump forward just a little in time, and as a kind of coda to the German ancestral-identity stream:

By the late 1930s, my grandfather as a young man and many of those around him (including his cousin Dick Schroeder) were active members of a cultural-civic group called the German-American Council, one of many such ethnocultural identity groups at the time across America.

Surviving photographs show my grandfather with his then-girlfriend (my grandmother; daughter of a German-born mother) on outings associated with the German-American Council. Here is one I found:

Picture labelled something like "German-American Council Outing," late 1930s. Left to right: My grandmother, my grandfather's cousin Dick Schroeder, person unknown to me (woman with hat), my grandfather Ern Kosswig

I find very few traces of the 1930s-era German-American Council online. The people who knew it first hand are probably all now gone. Even Dick Schroeder, pictured above as a young teenager, died in 2017 (age 91).

I do find this entry in the U.S. Congressional Record, in which a Congressman praises the German-American Council in a June 1938 speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. He praises its pro-U.S. patriotism, and enters remarks by its president, Dr. Frank Zwick into the record:

And so ends my reconstruction of how the Kosswig family would have seen the war that people tend to call World War I, both in 1914-1918 and in 1930 when the "time capsule book" that inspired this post was acquired by my great uncle, with a brief mention of the late 1930s.

I have weaved here back and forth between the two eras deliberately. The idea is that there is historical continuity, and that it is worth understanding.

I believe this is why some people are drawn to history in general, and family history in particular: The realization that life, our lives, and our meaning in life, comes to us from those who came before, that we individuals are links from past to present of something greater.

Though we may be weak and insignificant as individuals, we are part of something else, something multi-generational, something that is greater than a sum of the individuals or their individual experiences, you might say. Past-->Present-->Future is not static, but dynamic, organic, and linked together.

Which leads me to these final pictures that complete, in one sense, a link of the chain. The author of these words, with the partial subjects of these words, my maternal grandparents:

I don't look much like that anymore.

My grandfather, at the moment the picture was snapped, could not have imagined that decades later the picture would be accessible from anywhere on Earth through a computer, or through a telephone (and the defacto end of the distinction between the two, computer and phone, he probably could not have foreseen).

This post has been a multi-layered retrospective that I have attempted to anchor on that moment (Thursday, July 31, 1930) that my great-uncle inscribed his copy of All Quiet on the Western Front with his name and date.

If, ninety or so years from now, a descendant of mine finds something I have done or written, and finds it of enough value to comment on in some venue like this one, as I have done here, then the chain will be extended yet further into the future. If I could be so lucky!

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Post-365: Scenes from the End of the Great War, Plus 100 Years

11/12/2018

And so the centenary of the ceasefire (armistice) that ended the 1914-1918 war has come and gone.

I have written on these pages before about centenary events around the tragic 1914-1918 war, including twice about Nov. 11th:

Post 224: My Great-Grandfather's Piece of World War I (August 2014)
Post-242: November 11th, 1918 (November 2014)
Post 360: Armistice Day, and War Memory (November 2017)
Various other posts mention the 1914-1918 war to some extent; search site:Yule-tide.com "1914" or site:Yule-tide.com "1918" to see these.

The Best "November 11th, 1918" Visual for Commemoration

German soldier (left) lights British soldier's cigarette,
in the aftermath of a September 1918 battle.
Location: A field hospital (note the wound
dressing on the British soldier's neck).

Scenes like this (above) were repeated across the Western Front on November 11th, 1918, according to reports of those who were there. It seems surreal that the opposing armies immediately put down their guns and began intermingling and celebrating the end of the fratricide at last, in the hours after the ceasefire.

I propose that the above photo is the best possible commemoration of the Armistice, better than any thousand-word write-up anyone could come up with; some pictures, as they say, are worth more. (Though the photograph is not from Armistice Day itself [Nov. 11th] itself, it may as well be; it closely parallels the experience of hundreds of thousands that day.)

The picture symbolizes, at one level, the triumph of humanity and fraternal feeling through/over even the worst of politicians' blunders. I think it is symbolic, too, of the kind of the European unity and friendship that "could have been" (i.e., there was never any need at all for the 1914-1918 war.) At once both positive and tragic.

I tried to do my own small commemorations marking the exact 100th 'hourly' anniversaries of both the signing of the armistice and its much-more-famous implementation later that day (11 AM Paris time). There was some confusion to get through about "when," in today's time, 11 AM Paris time would be, tricky because of time zone changes and Daylight Savings Times going in and out of effect.

All press reports from the time say the war ended at 6 AM Washington, D.C., time and 11 AM Paris time, five hours difference:

It should be six hours' difference (Paris at GMT+1 and Washington, D.C. at GMT-5 is the way it is today). Daylight Savings Time originated, it is said, with a German Army plan to maximize war efficiency in 1916, and was adopted by most others after that. But both USA and France had reverted to Standard Time by November. So what is the origin of this 5-hour difference?

I learn now from the Time in France wiki article that France used GMT+0 from 1911-1940, five hours ahead of U.S. EST, before returning to GMT+1 during and after WWII and ever since. This means the war in 1918 ended at noon Germany time because they had always been on GMT+1. In today's times, then, that's 6 AM EST, 11 AM UK (GMT), and 12 Noon (today's) France/Germany time. The armistice agreement was signed six hours earlier, Midnight EST (11:59 PM Nov. 10th).

Here is how my time was spent in 2018:

Leading up to 11:59 PM EST (Sat. Nov. 10th) [Armistice signing hourly centenary]: I thought it appropriate to wait it out in solitary cold outside, looking up at a black sky at what I think was the Orion constellation. My thoughts were mainly pessimistic, about the negative effect the 1914-1918 war has had on all of us Western people who have come in its wake;

The 11 PM hour (Sat. night, Nov. 10th EST): I sent messages by phone to friends who have an interest in this kind of thing. One message was a string of messages quoting the last scene of Planet of the Apes: "You maniacs; You blew it up; Damn you; Damn you all to hell!" He got the point in the context of a commemoration of the disastrous 1914-1918 war.

Ending scene of Planet of the Apes (1968) as Charlton Heston discovers the Statue of Liberty and realizes that it had been Earth all along.

Six hours later (6 AM EST) [the hourly centenary of the end of the ceasefire and end of the war]. The firing is said to have continued until the very end of 10:59 AM (5:59 AM EST). It is almost haunting how impressively tight military discipline was in that everything stopped at precisely 11:00 AM, down to the second:

As the hundredth 'minute' anniversary of this remarkable moment passed, I stood in front of the door about to depart to McDonald's. By 7 AM I am at the memorial to General Pershing (commander of U.S. Forces in the war) in downtown Washington, D.C. for lack of anything better to do, and not wanting to sleep through it or go about things as usual.

The small and widely ignored Pershing memorial is the closest Washington, D.C. has to a 'national' WWI Memorial, though that is changing: A private group is sponsoring a more substantial WWI memorial (picture of their promotional poster above). It will be steps west of the existing General Pershing statue (pictured above).

A group of boy scouts (pictured above) was slowly assembling at Pershing Park, apparently to practice raising the flag and marching around. They must have been doing something ceremonial later that morning/day. It was only 7 AM by this time, and a Sunday morning.

I don't expect whatever was coming up later that morning/day would have much fanfare. It is a forgotten war, after all, and a war that is hard to be very positive about. It is pretty low on the average person's radar.

So what else happened on November 11th, 1918? I keep coming back to the accounts of the surreal-sounding, party-like atmosphere of the midday hours across the front. The imagery of the front-line soldiers of the opposing armies leaving (what had just been) their firing positions, approaching the other side through (what had just been) No Man's Land, cheering, greeting one another, soon celebrating together. It was apparently a very large number who did this all across the front.

A New Year's Eve-like atmosphere, maybe, but on larger scale. More joyous than that period after a run-of-the-mill Dec. 31st 11:59 PM. (As in the New Year, though, a new era did begin symbolically at that moment....but that's another, political-cultural, story, one the men streaming across No Man's Land to greet their fellows across the other side couldn't have known.)

How can such things happen? I imagine it must have started with a hardy, curious, and/or adventurous few at first, and when they showed the way (the "Demonstration Effect" -- I am doing this and I am not being killed, so you can, too), soon thousands, hundreds of thousands, were involved. And a few shots were all it would have taken to spoil it all, yet none came from any side. It all became as a big picnic, or "European family reunion" after the dark fog of war lifted.

U.S. flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker (1890-1973), having heard the armistice would be coming down at 11 AM, snuck his plane out (up) late that morning so he could witness it. He recounts what he saw in his autobiography.

In a scene fit for an epic film, Rickenbacker had his plane was right over the front as the clock turned from 10:59 to 11:00 AM, giving him the "best seat" in the world to witness the armistice. All other Allied planes had been grounded; he was alone in the sky. Rickenbacker reports seeing the abrupt silencing of the guns, followed not long after by a few figures below moving towards the other lines. Then, more...

Eddie Rickenbacker, native of Ohio, most successful U.S. pilot of WWI; Medal of Honor winner; witness to the armistice

As more and more figures slowly streamed across No Man's Land towards the opposite side, Rickenbacker says, there was no way any longer to tell the two sides apart, as the colors of the uniforms had kind of merged. He reports seeing some of the figures below appearing to physically embrace one another (in what must have been joy at this "outbreak" of peace). These 1910s-era planes were slow and low-flying. Rickenbacker would have been able to see quite a lot.

There were five hours of daylight left that day, between the ceasefire/armistice and sunset. Those must have been the best five hours of the war for many of men on all sides. It must have seemed to the German soldier, from the scenes across the front, that a Wilsonian peace really was at hand, one without anyone needing to be vanquished or humiliated or starved. (The politicians had other plans.)

I try to imagine what it was like to be a Western Front front-line soldier who wandered over into No Man's Land in those first hours of peace. The moment you see the enemy, face to face, but he is not your enemy -- and in fact never was 'your' enemy, just a man not so unlike you yourself.

One practical problem: You can't speak his language. So I imagine there was a lot of that kind of joking-around that people who don't quite speak the same language are prone to, i.e., covering/smoothing-over linguistic gaps with generous portions of lowish-brow good humor, grins, and gifts. (I have often been in situations like this at least from a linguistic-cultural angle, and can imagine how it must have been.)

It must have been that any Frontsoldat Germans with good English or French skills (and likewise Frenchman who spoke good German, etc.) would have been immediately, newly popular among their fellows and the centers of attention, as they would have served as ad-hoc translators and facilitators of the prodigious amount of attempted olive-branch communication-as-friend going on, and the gift giving.

To return to the photograph at the start of this post: The same kind of scene would have been repeated millions of times that day, across the front. That is the November 11th we ought to remember, one that symbolizes European fraternity and unity, not the death-cult that the commemorations of this day often seem to be.

Hope for civilization after all?

British political cartoon celebrating the armistice (Liverpool Echo, Nov. 11, 1918)

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Post-364: On the Isle of Saint Helena

3/24/2018

Napoleon, following his second capture in 1815, was sent off to one of Earth's most remote places, Saint Helena.

He would never again leave the island. After years alone there, with hardly even anyone to talk to, he died.

The image of Napoleon Bonaparte alone on Saint Helena, for years, thousands of miles from the continent of which he was nearly undisputed master for most of the 1800-1815 period, is poetically tragic even if one doesn't like Napoleon.

Are there any lessons from Napoleon for the rest of us? In the imagery of Saint Helena, there are. I would here cite the traditional folk song "The Isle of Saint Helena" which describes the man island-bound to Saint Helena and contemplating his life every day as he watches the waves.

"He [Napoleon] sees his victories,
and how fleeting they all were!"

The point is that all things are fleeting. Here is the full song The Isle of Saint Helena (starting at 0:47) and lyrics:

On the Isle of St. Helena
Bonaparte is away
from his wars and his fighting.
He has gone to a place
he can take no delight in.
He may sit there and dwell,
on the glories he's seen, Oh!
While alone, he remains,
on the Isle of St. Helena....

No more in St. Cloud
he'll be seen in such splendor.
Or go on with his wars
like the great Alexander.
He sees his victories,
and how fleeting they all were!
While his eyes are on the waves,
that surround St. Helena....

Oh Louisy, she weeps
for her husband's departin'.
And she dreams when she sleeps,
and she wakes broken-hearted.
Not a friend to console her,
in the past there were so many!
Now alone, she does mourn,
when she thinks of St. Helena....

Come all you's got wealth,
pray beware of ambition.
It's just one degree of fate,
that may change your condition.
Be steadfast in time,
what's to come you know not!
Your race, it could end,
on the Isle of St. Helena....

Now the rude rushing waves,
all around they are washing.
And the white billows heave.
On the rocks, they are crashing.
He may list to the wind,
o'er the great Mt. Diana!
While alone, he remains
on the Isle of St. Helena....

[End]

(19th-century traditional;
this version by Uncle Earl, 2007)

Napoleon's regime is, I would say, a good example of military-centric state-formation theory (as argued by Dr. Charles Tilly), or the idea that states/regimes are formed, consolidated, and/or animated by force-of-arms (“war made the state and the state made war”). A charismatic military victor forms a proto-state, or topples a weak state or proto-state and forms a new one (the general-turned-ruler). A ruler-turned-general is also possible, if he is seen to lead impressive military successes. In so doing he can rejuvenate his own weak state, a process that can even transform the state so much that other energies are released to the extent that a new regime has effectively been formed.

Any system based around a charismatic military figure is at risk when the victories stop coming, though, and the so-called charismatic state is the least stable of Max Weber's state types (the others are traditional and legal-rational). Politically, the image of Napoleon on Saint Helena shows the risks of any regime being based so totally on the force of charismatic military legitimacy.

But viewing Napoleon not as a "charismatic military figure," dictator, war-instigator, arch-imperialist, or threat to world peace (all of which are accurate labels), his fall and final years inevitably look tragic from the vantage of the isle of Saint Helena. And it is here that we can all relate to Napoleon:

We are all left on our own metaphorical Saint Helenas, multiple times throughout life. I refer to that state-of-mind we enter any longterm commitment or project ends. You are left only to reflect back on the glories, "and how fleeting they all were." Perhaps after ending a job or graduating from a school. You did your best (hopefully) maybe with mistakes or failures, but it's over. It is not a regret, more of a nostalgia or something like a pride at a job well done. Perhaps this occurs at the very end of one's life, as it turned out Napoleon was.

To the line Your race, it could end, on the Isle of St. Helena, I would suggest a stronger word than 'could'!

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Post-363: The Future of Fiji (and the World) as Seen From 1859

3/18/2018

(Expanded from a draft from mid-August 2015. I was reading about Fiji at the time before I was to spend twelve hours in that mysterious, tropical island-country as part of one of my returns-to-the-USA in late August 2015. I was coming from Brisbane, Australia visiting my cousin, M.W., and the long layover in Fiji was fortuitously also the cheapest option.)

(A review of an 1858 book, "Fiji and the Fijians," published in March 1859, concludes with a series of futurist predictions about the world that, reading them, leave me amazed.

The predictions have all come true (the second paragraph here, which is the final one of the ten-page book review):

(From an anonymous review appearing in The Knickerbocker [March 1859 issue] of the 1858 book Fiji and the Fijians by Thomas Williams and James Calvert (ed. George Stringer Rowe). The Knickerbocker was a New York literary magazine with an 1833-1865 publication run. It was similar in style, and likely a partial antecedent to and/or inspirtation for, The Atlantic [first issue published in 1857]). The entire March 1859 of Knickerbocker is online here.)

Fiji Sunset

First, my own brief experience in Fiji, then an attempt to evaluate the Knickerbocker writer's predictions with the distance of 159 years of time elapsed since publication. Summary: Very accurate.

A Brief Foray into Fiji, Late August 2015
Fiji is not like any place I have been before or since.

I formally entered the country and have the passport stamp to prove it, which means I must be counted in the 67,831 U.S. citizens who entered Fiji in calendar year 2015 (186/day). I see that two-thirds of foreign entries into Fiji that year were Australia and New Zealand citizens, a combined 506,000 (1,386/day).

When you drop into a new place, not really knowing what to do or how things work, a lot of what happens depends on luck and the good-will of strangers. It is always that way. Planning does help, but often even a well-formed plan starts fraying or falls apart entirely upon contact with the real world. You make the best of it. My plan was had been to get a short taxi ride from the airport to the center of the large town nearby, walk around a while, then go back to the airport. Not very ambitious, but this was just one stop on an ambitious week-long return to the USA. Other stops included Hong Kong [1.5 days]; Malaysia [one day]; Gold Coast/Brisbane, Australia [three days]; Christmas Island (Kirimati) [about two hours only]; Hawaii [two days]; Seattle [half day]. Doing it this way is the kind of win-win the careful traveller with flexible timing can sometimes get: cheapest cost and many built-in (long layover) stops with no need to pay for accommodation.

As soon as I emerge from the airport, my plan is immediately rejected by consensus of the loitering Indian taxi drivers. "There is nothing in town." "All you'll find is people trying to sell you things." They implied they would especially target/accost a White outsider to buy trinkets.

Their criticism immediately seemed plausible. With only a matter of hours and with very little money to work with, what options were there? There is also the old dilemma of whether to trust anyone in such a case: Is this guy running a scam?

I said, Okay, what do you suggest I do instead? The leader of the Indian taxi-loitering group produced a sleek brochure for a resort. He said one of the resorts nearby lets in foreigners even if they are not paid guests. I am not sure if he somehow got a payoff for sending people there but it didn't seem there was any way the resort would know it was this particular taxi guy who sent me. I asked how far away that was. Not too far. I asked about the fare. Not much (by U.S. standards at all).

I didn't want to hang around the airport. It was not the most comfortable or welcoming place. In contrast to the taxi group outside, the airport staff inside was dominated by ethnic-Fijians. A mix of people were moving around, and there seemed not enough space anywhere. Most foreigners were ferried off to resort shuttle buses. Soldiers were about. All the soldiers appeared to be native-Fijian soldiers, with full gear. I was told, I think by the taxi driver later on the ride, that they had just returned from the Golan Heights. The concept of heavily armed, tropical Fijians keeping peace in the Golan Heights seems surreal.

The next thing I know, I am in the back of a taxi (not the same one as the guy who handed me the brochure) and zooming away. The driver, a local Indian, perhaps 40 years old, talkative, interested in rugby. We pass through an ethnic-Fijian village or two. Outside the window are lots of locals standing around. Enormous people built like linebackers. The driver seems a little apprehensive about driving through the ethnic-Fijian village but waves to them as we pass through. We arrive. The resort security waves us in when they see a White foreigner (me) in the car.

Going there was the right choice. I arrived under afternoon blue skies but sunset came soon. For some reason there were few to no other resort guests on the beach at sunset. The beach sunset looked something like the tropical picture in this post above, which I find online but I believe was taken at the same resort.

The taxi driver was also happy to be there, as I presume he is seldom able to enter these kinds of places. He offered to take me back to the airport in the later evening and then receded away as I headed inside the resort proper and towards the beach. I know he spent at least some of the next hours inside the resort, because a few hours later I saw him in there loitering around the open-air bar area. We talked a while there, too. Seeing him standing up and not in the driver's seat of a car revealed his typically Indian thin build. He was grinning and happy to be there.

Appraising the Success of the 1859 Fiji Predictions
The beach at sunset was silent but for the waves and the faint laughter of the handful of others along the beach. BEing there and was like a step back into the pre-industrial world; it all would have been recognizable to Moby-Dick-era observers. The resort, in fact, marketed itself as the site of the first landing of the ancestors of the Melanesian Fiijians' ancestors, centuries ago.

This preservation presentation of things in an apparently pristine state is a vindication of the 1859 predictions (see especially #5 below).

Specific Predictions in the Final Paragraph

"a chain of empires along the coasts of the Pacific"
"electric wires shall have brought the whole world within speaking distance"
"improved arts of locomotion shall have reduced ocean-travel from days to hours"
"these islands will rise into great worldly importance"
"They will have the charm of beauty and the convenience of loneliness"
"They may be winter residences for merchants doing business on either continent"
"they may be solitary retreats for scholars elaborating theories and prosecuting studies"
"they may be haunts of fashion and pleasure"
"Civilization will yet surely claim them [Fijian islands]"

Correct: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9
Questionable but relatively correct: 4
Incorrect(?): 6, 7

I find elsewhere that over 40% of Fiji's GDP is from tourism, another vindication of the 1859 prediction (#8, #9).

Even #6 and #7 may be correct for all I know, and the authors anyway qualify them with "may be." Their stronger assertions are almost all definitely and impressively correct (possibly excluding #4, but this is subjective).

The existence of the product "Fiji Water" is still another vindication of the spirit of the 1859 article. I bought a bottle of Fiji Water at a gas station in Fiji on the way back to the airport, mainly for the novelty of it and to see what the price would be. The price was somehow comparable to what it costs on the shelves of the grocery store in the USA, ten thousand of miles from the source.

As for his general prediction, confidently made, of a "chain of empires along the Pacific" (#1), this was written at a time when the population of the primary modern city anywhere along the Pacific, San Francisco, had just hit a mere 50,000 in population, with the rest of enormous California at only about 300,000 (but rising fast). Ten years earlier, just before the Gold Rush, there had only been 1,000 people in San Francisco.

Japan, too, had only signed a trading treaty with the USA a mere months before the reviewer wrote his 1859 prediction of a highly modernized Pacific Rim. There was no way to know that this boom along the Pacific would last over the next sixteen decades and counting.

Did the writer get anything wrong? The most important thing he misses in his series of predictions about Fiji is the major impact the British Empire would have on the racial-cultural balance of the islands. The British began (I learn) to bring in Indian labor to Fiji starting in 1879, a formal labor program that ended in 1916. They had a similar policy elsewhere, but in Fiji the number of natives was smaller, and if the program had continued, Fiji today could easily be majority Indian.

Who Wrote the Review of Fiji & the Fijians?
The review is anonymous. Washington Irving (1783-1859), associated closely with The Knickerbocker, seems to me a plausible candidate. A man born in 1783 may have predicted with great accuracy the world as it would be two-hundred-plus years after his birth.

Other possibilities are the magazine's editor Lewis Gaylord Clark (1808-1873), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), or any of the the other regular contributors.

Observations on the Racial-Cultural Balance in Fiji
The native Fijians, related to Papua New Guineans and others in the Melanesian meta-ethnic group, are large and physically tough people, dark but obviously distinct from Subsaharan Africans. My immediate impression from brief experience was that they are handily out-competed economically by the Indians of the islands. This is hardly a new impression but seems a long-held observation/stereotype/fact of Fijian society over the past century-plus.

I understand that the Indians, at their peak, about equalled ethnic-Fijians in number. Today, ethnic-Fijians outnumber Indians 3-to-2. All the taxi drivers at the airport that sunny day I recall being Indian, as I say. I wish I could now recall what the Indian taxi driver said about Fijian politics. What he said at the time was guarded, and some of it I recall not understanding. I think he was implicitly politically disgruntled because the Indians are now definitely outvoted by the Fijian majority, which also controls the military. Independent Fiji's first and last Indian-led government was, I learn, overthrown by a coup in May 2000. (There have been three coups in Fiji since 1987.)

Today's Fiji looks like another example, then, of Lee Kuan Yew's maxim about democracy: “In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”

Speaking of religion. Census figures suggest that all ethnic-Fijians are nominal Christians, another outcome in line with the 1859 article (the paragraph right above the prediction paragraph). The dominant church is Methodist, the denomination of at least one of the missionary-writers of the book whose Knickerbocker review I am here reviewing. Less than 1% of ethnic-Fijians are Mormons, unlike certain other Pacific islands. The Indians are 77% Hindu, 16% Muslim, 6% Christian, roughly the religious balance of India itself.

The smartphone I used at the time had an "FM Radio" function and while in Fiji I made a point to listen to all the stations I could pick up. There were a few in English, others in a language I could not recognize and presumed was Fijian ([very] distantly related, so they say, to Malay and Tagalog). A large number of stations were what I presumed to be Hindi and played Indian music.

From this I can only conclude that after generations on the islands, Indian Fijians maintain their language, culture, and group-cohesion, even so far from the Hindu heartland. With the removal of the British Empire (independence, 1970), there is no larger identity for the Indians to attach to, and assimilation into a Melanesian culture seems impossible. I thus presume that a consolidation of Indian identity has occurred in Fiji since the 1970s, along with the latent political disgruntlement above mentioned.

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Post-362: My "23andMe" ancestral results considered; and, Some thoughts On the Politics of Ancestry-Identity

3/10/2018

Today's genetic tests are able, with remarkable degrees of accuracy considering all that they have to go on is a vial of your saliva, to reasonably reliably estimate your ancestral origins. Not perfectly, but pretty well. (Maybe we have passed the point where intelligent people feel free or even compelled to say ridiculous things on this topic.)

I took the 23andMe ancestry test in February 2017 and a few weeks later got the results back. The "results" are percentage estimates for personal ancestry. I have some comments and thoughts on the results and related issues that I'd like to record here. I'll compare the raw numbers to what I know of my documented ancestry and related ancillary information I know to fill in gaps.

The final section deals with the political implications of what is (purported) to be measured by tests like these and how people use and understand personal ethnic-ancestry identity. The political implications are substantial I think; this is the kind of iceberg issue that is mostly below the surface, unseen but enormous.

(Warning: Long post).

I have occasionally posted about this subject over the years on these pages, including:

Post-223: Kinsfolk by the Millions
Post-330: The Call of Northwestern Europe

Europe

First, my father's results. My father took the test about two years before I did. His reaction to his results was to the effect that there was nothing interesting in it, i.e., it was all as expected.

The general comments I would on his results are:

23andMe misguessed a substantial portion of my father's ancestral-stock [17.9%] to be British, when in fact, as best we know, it is 0% British; all was in Scandinavia as of the mid-1800s. (Yes, British vs. Scandinavian is a pretty fine-grained distinction to make.)
23andMe gives my father a 51.0% Scandinavian estimate, when it should be 100%. The ratio of Scandinavian(correct)-to-British(incorrect) is less than three-to-one.
A close analysis does reveal one ancestral component not otherwise known to us / not documented in the paper-genealogy records, which is Finnish. (Much more on this below and what I think is a plausible origin-story for it.) My father gets a 3.4% Finnish reading, which I seem to have disproportionately inherited. I get 2.3% Finnish, of which zero is estimated to be from my mother (see below).
My father's older brother took the test recently and got 10.0% British (much lower than my father's, but again both should be 0%), 67.1% Scandinavian, and 3.8% Finnish (similar to my father's).

Now, my own.

The table below contains my own comprehensive ancestry-estimate results:

Compare the 23andMe estimate for me (91.5% Northwest European, of which: 31.2% Scandinavian, 27.7% French/German, 6.7% British Isles, 2.3% Finnish, 23.6% Broadly Northwest European) to my ancestors' known places of residence in the middle 1800s:

[Paternal] 50% Scandinavia
- 12.5% Denmark (patrilineal line traces back to the island of Funen [Fyn] circa late 1700s)
- 12.5% Sweden
- 25% Norway (Hedmark)
[Maternal] Mainly Germany, some in New England (USA)
- 37.5% Germany (partilineal line traces back to Saxony; these German ancestors were all Lutherans)
- 12.5% Vermont (all with Colonial New England roots, patrilineally the Hazen family [see post-224] and similar families filling out the rest)

I stress what I know about the 'patrilineal' lines in the summary above because culturally we always know more about male lines. Whereas culture demands thing be simple, genetic tests can be very fine-grained: The system 23andMe uses can separate paternally-inherited from maternally-inherited DNA if you link your account with a parent's. Naturally I linked mine with my father's.

The following is the father(known)-vs.-mother(implied) breakdown for my own inherited DNA:

First, some comments on each major component:

Read More

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Post-361: The City of "One Mountain, Korea" (Ilsan): Name Origins

1/31/2018

It won't be soon that I forget Ilsan, Korea (일산).

What is Ilsan? It lies along one of the easiest avenues of approach from the DMZ south towards Seoul. It was my home for one year, 2009-2010. It is a place I still return to an average of around once a year. Many of these times are to visit my friend Jared, who has now lived in Korea ten years, almost all of that in Ilsan.

Some things about the Ilsan I knew are gone, never to return except in reminiscence. My former employer, disappeared. As far as I know, they are now running a business in Koreatown, Los Angeles. The American "burger" restaurant with the comically long name, long gone. The group of foreigners that seemed invincible to me when I first arrived, including Basil and Hannah, both of whom are not likely to ever return to Korea, much less Ilsan. There is also now a Mormon Church partially blocking the view of my old home. (I have often run into White Mormons in Korea, ex-missionaries. One of them [in his case an ex-Mormon but all the same a former missionary in Korea] is actually a Korea Studies student with me now in the USA. I don't recall ever having met a Korean Mormon.)

Forgive the extraneous content above. The purpose of this post is to determine "which mountain" once and for all. Ilsan, you see, means "One Mountain" in Chinese, represented by the remarkably simple and intuitive Chinese characters of "一山." So which mountain is that 'one' mountain? This is not as simple a question as it seems.

I would note first of all that "il san" is not how Koreans would say "one mountain;" They would say either "Han San" or most likely "San Hana" [한 산; 산 하나]. Chinese numbers ("il" for one) are not used for counting objects in the Korean I know. Perhaps they were a century ago when Ilsan apparently got its name. (There remains a certain arbitrariness to when Korean numbers are to be used and when Chinese numbers are to be used which still trips up even advanced students of Korean.

Ilsan Train Station, which is near the old Ilsan and has been a train station for over a century, must offer a clue. I was there to visit Jared this past time, as he works nearby (I didn't work or live nearby in my year there; Ilsan is today much bigger and I lived miles away).

Ilsan Station is directly connected to Seoul Station on the Gyeonghui Line, a rail line built by the Japanese in the early 1900s, modernized and fully integrated into the Seoul metropolitan rail transit system since the late 2000s. The time needed from Seoul Station to Ilsan Station is 36 minutes, but trains are infrequent.

If you are coming from Seoul and do not get off at Ilsan Station but continue northward, in another 24 minutes you must get off as you have arrived at the present day's northernmost accessible train station on this line, Munsan (문산역) (at 38.85 degrees north [location]). Below you see a scattering of people waiting to board a Seoul-bound train. I had just gotten off the northbound (Munsan-bound) train, boarding on the right.

[Times/Fares]
Seoul-to-Ilsan: 36 mins (1,650 KRW, or $1.50 USD)
Ilsan-to-Munsan: 24 mins
Seoul-to-Munsan: 60 minutes (2,050 KRW, or $1.90 USD)

I wonder if it was deliberately planned that the Seoul-to-Munsan duration would be 60 minutes, a round and thus symbolic figure, as if to say: "From the heart of Seoul, to the DMZ in an hour (exactly)."

There is actually one more station north of Munsan, called Dorasan (38.90 degrees north) [location], just a few miles from the Kaesong Industrial Zone inside North Korea. Dorasan, being right along the DMZ, is not regularly accessible. If the DMZ ever opens to traffic, Seoul-to-Kaesong through Munsan and Dorasan would seem to be about 85 minutes, and that is by slow/cheap train.

Having arrived in Ilsan, I walked towards the main road where Jared works where we planned to get coffee and then lunch as we talked. There was something on my mind that day, but that is another story.

Here is the street on which Jared has worked most of ten years (I worked on the same street actually, but a few miles south). This is a few minutes' walk from the station and the road is, according to Jared, a very old one. If we can "one mountain" from here, that would be a good lead. You'll notice that there is, in fact, a mountain in the distance (there rarely isn't in Korea). More on that later.

The original Ilsan was just a village around the titular train station, with all you see in the above picture essentially nothing but farmland in the late 1980s. In the late 1980s, the Korean government selected this flat land for the site of a new, planned city, with great success by the 2000s.

Jared's interesting life story includes a stint in his youth in the U.S. Army, stationed just north of Ilsan circa 1990 and 1991. He often says he hated the army but was glad he did it anyway, and lucked out with an honorable early-release with downsizing after the USSR collapsed. Jared recalls an Ilsan of dirt roads and dilapidated shacks (well I made that up, but it fits my mental picture). Rural idyll with the occasional army vehicle racing along the dirt road. (I understand that the South Korean 9th "White Horse" Division [9사단 "백마"] is (still) today stationed near Ilsan. In one year I don't recall ever seeing anything suggesting a military presence in or near Ilsan, except that the name of the Gyeonghui train station nearest to my own workplace of the time was called Baengma, or White Horse. I didn't realize this connection until years later, though.)

I lived in Ilsan for just over one year, a long time ago now, 2009 and 2010. Before the Smartphone Age. I knew very little about Korea at the time and had no money. My first two months in Ilsan were with no cell phone at all, I recall, partly because I had problems legally making a contract as a foreigner (without an Alien Registration Card), partly because I felt I didn't need one. This is a good example of how "the Ilsan I knew" was one from which I was pretty disconnected, actually.

I really walked into something completely unknown in 2009, showing up in Ilsan. One benefit of somehow ending up in a completely foreign place, though, is that "everything is new," which lends itself to an intellectual excitement (for some of us), namely being able to ask a child's questions with an adult's mind. (After several more subsequent non-consecutive years in Korea since, the foreignness is still there, but the newness is not. While I know much more, many good questions remain but go unnoticed, unasked, and unexplored.)

After talking a while in the coffeeshop, Friday late morning, full of adjummas and almost no men at all, we stopped by Jared's employer, and English institute the name of which is a common term in Buddhist theology. I knew the owner a little from visits over the years. He was a KATUSA, a Korean embedded with the U.S. Army due to language skill.

My own place of employment in that year was roughly similar, including that the husband had also been a KATUSA.

I taught 5th through 9th graders, and the youngest are now college age. I later did that full-time two more years elsewhere (Bucheon), as (I thought) the money was good.

The hagwon Jared works at is on the third floor of this building. I notice the first floor has a phone shop. There are an incredible number of those.

The Friday I visited Jared I had a curious phone problem, myself, though not as bad as the one that would befall me two weeks later (the theft of my phone at Texas Street, Busan, with large loss of data and psychological loss that the 2009-Me who went two months with no phone at all would be puzzled at). The phone problem on the Ilsan day was that I had no Korean SIM card at the time on this visit, and I had a guy making business cards for me who told me to call him at a certain time. There are hardly any public phones any more, of course. Jared offered me to call from his work phone, but I declined, with the original intent to find my old workplace. For some reason that didn't happen, and as I realized time was running out I just went back to Ilsan Station, which did have a public phone.

I called the business card guy, inquired if the batch was done: he said it was. I went down to Euljiro, Seoul, to pick the batch up before he closed for the weekend. I am embarrassed to admit that I couldn't really figure out how to use the payphone. (I can't be the only one in the late 2010s like this.) It took a few minutes to get it to work.

In the meantime, I had seen no other mountains except the one Jared pointed out in the distance in this picture.

An Inquiry into the Origin of the Name "Ilsan"
Back to the main question, which has bugged me for years. I intend to not rest until I come up with a substantive answer.

Q. If Ilsan means "One Mountain" (it does), which mountain is it?

There are three candidates:

(1) Jeongbalsan (정발산), a small hill in the center of today's Ilsan New City (the least likely because of how insignificant it is; but I have heard residents of Ilsan propose this, possibly including former coworkers, though my memory is fuzzy);

(2) Shimhak Mountain (심학산) (183.5 m) [location], 7km NW, as the crow flies, from Ilsan Station. This is the one directly visible in the distance in the photo above, a little to the left of the road;

(3) Gobong Mountain [location]. Gobong Mountain (which I have hiked on, has ample traces of military activity/exercises: ditches, trenches, reinforced circular pits for, I presume, artillery), is 2km NE of Ilsan Station but not really visible from present-day Ilsan, all the development of which is on the west side of the tracks. If Gobong is the titular 'one' mountain of Ilsan, it is ironic in that it is not visible to 90%, 95% of present-day Ilsan residents.

Jared believes that the 'one mountain' must refer to the mountain visible from the road, Shimhak Mountain. The present-day road has existed for a very long time in some form, a dirt road until the early 1990s. The old village of Ilsan was in the vicinity and so the clear view of this solitary mountain lends itself to the name 'one mountain,' Jared says, which sounds plausible. I have also heard him speculate over the years that Ilsan may have been named arbitrarily by the railroad to give some name to a proposed station.

Going a little into Korean Wikipedia, I see this partially or wholly confirmed as follows:
"일산동의 본래 이름은 본래 와야촌(瓦野村) 마을이다. 이곳 ‘일산’이란 이름이 처음 등장하는 것은 일제시대로 일본인들이 경의선 철도를 만들고 이곳에 기차역을 설치하면서 인근의 한산마을 이름을 ‘일산’으로 바꾸면서 사용한 것으로 알려져 있다. 이외에 일산은 이 지역의 고유한 이름으로 이곳에 고봉산과 같이 큰산이 하나밖에 없어 일산이라 부르고 있다는 유래설도 전해온다."

My Translation:
"Ilsan District's original name was Waya Village. It was first named 'Ilsan' during the Japanese period during the construction of the Gyeongui Line, when the Japanese erected a train station in the area. At this time, the Japanese renamed Hansan village 'Ilsan.' A common belief further has it that the name was applied because other than Gobong Mountain (고봉산), there is no other large mountain in the area."

I am left with two questions: (1) The entry specifies that it is commonly believed (유래설도) that Gobong is the mountain. Does that means no one really knows? What evidence is there for it being Gobong except conjecture(2) Which is more plausible: That the Japanese renamed an existing 'Hansan' to the sinified 'Ilsan' (Han and Il both mean 'one'), or did some Japanese railroadmen create the name outright and this 'Hansan' originally coexisted with 'Ilsan' before the Japanese imposed a sinified uniformity at some later time? There is no record I can see of any "一山" (Hansan or Ilsan) on a late-1800s map of the area, but then there are no small village designations. Perhaps after all this effort I am no closer to a definitive answer.

Now I find that a Mr. Choi Jae-Yong endorses the Hansan-->Ilsan and Gobong Mountain arguments in a 2015 book, "In Search of the History of Our Land through History and Etymology" (역사와 어원으로 찾아가는 우리 땅 이야기). (The relevant excerpt in Korean is here.)

Choi says that the place was also called 한뫼, hanmweh, the latter character (as far as I know) an extinct Korean word for mountain. He adds the surprising twist that this 'Han' we are dealing with did not mean 'One'! The Chinese character used for the name was a different Han, which he says, in a complicated explanation, can here mean 'great,' or 'big/high,' which would fit because Gobong itself means high mountain. Choi says that the Japanese changed the name in 1914.

How could the Japanese, who could then, and still can, read Chinese characters and take pride therein, get the intended meaning-according-to-the-Chinese-characters wrong? They changed it from 'high mountain' (Hansan 韓山) to 'one mountain' (Hansan [一山] in Korean; Ilsan [also 一山], sinicized)?

I would propose the following as the most likely explanation: The Japanese railroad promotion man in charge of naming the station, or the low-level Japanese government official, or whoever it was who was in charge of sinicizing place names in 1914, understood spoken Korean. He either heard the name orally only (hearing "han san," it is only natural he thought it would mean "one mountain" rather than the other, obscure, Chinese-origin Han discussed at confusing length by Choi above), perhaps because the only Koreans on hand when he inquired about the local village name were illiterate. It was a deeply rural area at the time, after all. Thus the name was transformed.

So it was that one Japanese railroad man's or bureaucrat's misunderstanding a century ago stuck the place with the goofy name 'One Mountain'! Let this be a lesson: As some Korean teachers are wont to tell you, "Always check the Hanja" (Chinese character).

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Post-360: Nov 11th, Armistice Day and War Memory

11/12/2017

November 11th, 2017, is 99 years since WWI Armistice Day (Nov. 11, 1918) (see also post-242). Sometime in the past twelve months I watched the 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front for the first time. Some years ago I read some of the book but misplaced it before finishing.

U.S. Veterans Day is on the day it is because of Nov. 11th, 1918. Few seem aware of this. This leads me to ask how Americans actually remember the war today.

All wars tend to be remembered differently by those who actually lived through them, or fought in them, than by later generations. This we can attribute to changing political circumstances and/or to concerted 'lobbying' efforts to remember a war in a certain way. There are many examples of this.

There is not now and I don't think ever was much of a 'lobby' to remember WWI in the USA in a certain way. The U.S. entered this war towards the end and was only involved in major combat operations for six months in 1918, though its contribution and political commitment was decisive in the German decision to give up in fall 1918. Considering the limited commitment and the return to traditional "isolationism" (the George Washington Doctrine) quickly after the armistice, American memory of the war is inevitably going to be weaker than maybe any of the belligerents', on whose land battles were fought, whose political systems were shaken and in many cases overturned by the war, and many more of whose men were killed.

A German pacifist and war veteran wrote the All Quiet on the Western Front novel in the late 1920s, inspired by his own experiences (a non-pacifist bestseller of the same era was Storm and Steel by another German veteran, Ernst Junger). All Quiet was immediately a huge international bestseller, a fact that alone tells us what war memory was like ten years after the war's end. I think these four stills from that film may capture its essence:

The film follows a group of 18-year-old students (first picture), who are encouraged to enlist by their ultrapatriotic teacher, who is presented by the film as a pompous fool. The boys join enthusiastically. They fall in with Army life and have some good but many bad experiences with characters in the Army on their own side (second picture). They fight, and begin to die (third picture), but for what gain they die (even the temporary tactical gain of a particular battle) is deliberately made completely unclear in the film. They die for nothing. By the end (the fourth picture is the very last scene, a fade-out onto the field of crosses), almost all the major characters have been killed in various ways by an unseen, mechanical enemy. A waste of human life. That is the message of the movie.

This is classic pacifism, and is really not the standard view of war, of the military, in the USA that I have known since the 1990s. Pacifist ideas as such today have been relegated to a political margin, heard sometimes but not really taken seriously. (This is an inevitability given the world political situation since about 1942.)

I understand that pacifism was once very important in U.S. culture/politics, and I don't mean that brief period around the late 1960s and 1970s that exerts a powerful cultural memory now fifty years later. I mean a much longer time ago. I discovered in my grandfather (b. 1916)'s book collection, several serious pacifist books of the late 1910s and 1920s or so, which he seems to have inherited from his father (born 1886 in Germany; in the USA from 1887) and other relatives. He also had a copy of All Quiet on the Western Front, in English, published in one of its early editions.

So how do non-pacifist Americans, that is, mainstream Americans, remember the disastrous 1914-1918 in Europe? I think most Americans "write it off" as a prelude to the 1939-1945 war; that is, the 1939-1945 mythos swallows up 1914-1918, destroys it, "puppetizes it," towards the political ends of 1939-1945 which remain with us in the 2010s. Roughly: Imperial Germany in 1914 is the "bad guy," is a nationalistic-militaristic bully-state that threatens world peace, and -- though this is vaguer -- somehow maliciously orchestrated the war in summer 1914 through aggressive intent and aggressive action. A surer menace to world peace, unknown. A regime that bore all the "war guilt" for 1914.

These were the ideas churned out of the British or French propaganda ministries, ideas that at the time were widely rejected in the USA ,in which popular opinion was against the war through its first years, ideas which, in the 1920s were essentially all discredited in the vigorous historians' academic battles over "war guilt" for 1914 (the so-called Kriegsschuldfrage). In other words, this view of Imperial Germany in 1914 is wrong, at least if we trust expert consensus. Imperial Germany, the historians concluded, was not much different from any other regime in Europe at the time and acted in its interests, even if a bit sloppily, just like every other state did.

I note that the U.S.-made film All Quiet on the Western Front, released in April 1930, does not depict the German soldiers as villains at all but generals as the opposite, as sympathetic people, normal people, not unlike "us."

The problem was not 'Germany' or 'Prussianism' in any sense which singles out Germans as a people, or Berlin's Hohenzollern Dynasty, or the military, or anything else; the problem was the lack of a stable international system, and, really, the fact that 20th century Europe still had a 19th century ruling apparatus.

So rather than a morality tale of "this state was a good-guy and that state a bad-guy," what is forgotten, I think, in the popular mind, is that the real lesson is one of poor statesmanship. It was so during the July 1914 crisis, during the war, and during/after the 1918-1919 peace negotiations. Too few realized that this war had no winners. It had been socially destructive and seriously destabilizing. Perhaps worst of all, it gave birth and sudden energy to the global Communist movement, starting in Russia; one hundred years ago this week, in fact, Nov. 7, 1917, armed Communists took over St. Petersburg, then the Russian capital. Russia was in peace negotiations with Germany within weeks and exited the war soon thereafter, before large numbers of Americans began arriving at the front.

In long retrospect, strong candidates for villainy may be the British and French governments, who angrily demanded their diplomats shove aside hapless President Wilson's "peace without victory," demanded Germany be punished, and saw to it that it was. The War Guilt clause demanded reparations. The results were bad for everyone.

Anyway, my impression is that the British, French, and Germans remember the 1914-1918 war, after a century, with a deep sadness, closer to the All Quiet on the Western Front view than anything. It is harder for Americans to do this.

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Post-359: Martin Luther at 500 / Scenes from the Luther Party

10/31/2017

Count me among the many fans or admirers of Martin Luther. Today is his day. Not his birthday, but the day he crossed his own Rubicon in life and began to really achieve his life's purpose.

Five hundred years ago today (Oct. 31, 1517), Luther the young monk, Luther the German dissident nobody, walked a short distance to the town center and nailed a document he'd been working on to the door of the main church. This was the church in a no-name town with a third-rate university (Wittenberg). His document called for a theological debate; he'd been mulling over the issues at hand for a few years; he was sure the authorities were wrong and equally sure there was a need for someone to take a stand. If not me, who? And the rest, as we like to say, is history.

I have been twice to this very site. The church still stands in Germany and the door has been re-created. Wittenberg is today a tourist site. The town center, preserved, is not much different, i imagine, than it was in the 1510s. It is not a bad place but not the most impressive place you'll ever see, either.

How could it be? A country-bumpkin type, not one of the important people, someone who'd stumbled his way through early life, someone who seemed adrift and obsessed over his religious uncertainties. This character rises out of nowhere to confront and defeat the Church and the entire established order of Europe?

(Thanks to my friend James A. for this version)

One reason why the Luther story has inspired so many for so long is that there are many Luthers. People can see what they want to see in him; he is not a figure easily classifiable, partly because he is a bridge between historical eras. partly because he was such a trailblazer that he came before most such classifications were even roughly in place.

We have Luther the Devout Christian; Luther the Discoverer of Grace and thus Luther the Religious Revivalist. Ending it there cannot begin to capture what's going on. We have Luther the Common Man (against the 'Fatcat' or the priestly elite caste); Luther the Uncompromising Crusader for Truth and Honest-Dealing (against the slick con-men types); Luther the Optimist (following his discovery of Grace); Luther the Intellectual and Scholar; Luther the Bombastic Propagandist; Luther the Country-Bumpkin and anti-Elitist (and yet his patron is the King of Saxony); Luther the flouter of early-16th-century Political Correctness is enjoyable to watch. We have a Luther whose immediate ancestors were Late-Medieval men yet Luther is not one, thus Luther the New Man, the Early Modern Man; the latter leads us to another enduring image, Luther the German (or perhaps Luther the Northern European); Luther the modern-style Patriot or proto-Nationalist is a sure extension from that. Lest anyone accuse him of being a proto-Prussian-militarist aligning to some kind of late 19th-to-eary-20th-century stereotype, we also have Luther the Pacifist who consistently refuses and denounces any armed struggle. Lest any of this seem too serious, we cannot miss Luther the Lover of Life (following his discovery of Grace, and following his marriage); and Luther the Joke-Teller, the Dry-Humorist.

But the Luther that most endures would seem to be Luther the crusading, righteous Dissident; the (Religio-)Political Insurgent. And what of politics? We have a Luther the Conservative coexisting with a Luther the Overturner of things Conservative'; Luther the abandoner of established, inherited, dominant orthodoxies that are not defensible. Tradition itself ipso facto is no justification for Luther, after all, if it means indifference and lazy acceptance or wrong or harmful ideas. Hence, after all, Luther the Reformer.

The German press in this the 500th Reformation Year, has called Luther Der erste Wutbürger, or "the First 'Angry Citizen'." The term 'Wutbürger' [Anger/Rage+Citizen] is a recent coinage in German, voted 2010's "new word of the year." Wutbürger is defined in English by a Wiki writer as "an angry or enraged citizen, especially one who feels politically marginalized." The term was coined to describe, among others, Thilo Sarrazin, an ex-official who published a book highly critical of the German state, and also various civic movements on the scene in 2010. The seven years since have seen many more Wutbürger on the scene and many are now in the Bundestag.

Usually, political anger is a flash in the pan and by its nature cannot sustain itself, or in some cases it is crushed by force. In other words, very few Luther-type figures ever achieve anything. He quickly became

The early days of mass printing allowed his writings to spread widely, quickly, cheaply and for him to become a symbol for the aspirations of millions. (I learned from the new Luther movie that 100% of his writings were 100% 'pirated' by early printers; he never received one cent of royalties for any of the millions of copies of his many writings; he didn't mind.)

If words can be printed, so could pictures. Some of the pro-Reformation artwork that took off with the Luther movement is very clever and like nothing we see today. They must be among the earliest political cartoons. They range from "agitation propaganda," to serious lionization of Luther and the reformers ("Luther's Triumph"), to mockery, belittlement or demonization of the detractors ("papists"), to the satirical, like this:

This pro-Lutheran cartoon (1524) makes me laugh: "The Devil proclaims the opening of his feud with Luther." The And how else does one inform one of one's intention to open a feud but to write as much in a letter and hand deliver it? Naturally!

I found this Reformation cartoon in a Luther biography I found at the library which I have tried reading during spare moments but failed to get through before the 500th has finally come:

.I was briefly (a few days) in Germany again in early 2017, on the way to and from Korea. I recall that commemorations and excitement about the Reformation anniversary were around. I understand the whole country, by special proclamation, has October 31st off this year for the anniversary, and many have Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday all off. A Luther Vacation.

I commemorated the great man in multiple ways, one of which you are now reading, i.e. my attempt to write something of some meaning on him that hasn't already been said a hundred times (in this perhaps I have not succeeded; my insights on him cannot be said to be novel). There was also the new Luther movie in early October (I went with M. who was in town that week; a great time).

Another commemoration was a last-minute decision on Sunday October 29th (Reformation Sunday). I snuck in a visit to the Washington, D.C., National Cathedral, which, for the occasion, was full of thousands of Lutherans (and others, I presume). Every one of the thousands of seats was full and there were people crowding all along the sides and in the back, myself included. I have never seen so many Lutherans in one place. "Jubilant" is how I'd describe the atmosphere. As if a war had just been won. I'm glad I went, despite rainy/windy conditions and my having an exam in International Trade the next day.

Then there was the hugely successful Reformation Party / Luther Party at the church, some moments from which I include here:

I created (below) a shorter version of the above exposition by Luther, using a few props:

Below: The dining room stood ready for the Luther Party. Above: some of the Luther-related books on the rear bookshelf visible in the picture below.

The food was great and all-you-can-eat. There were over a hundred attendees, among whom was me. It was I who took all these pictures. I brought a friend, G.S., and he enjoyed it very much, especially given how long (5+ years) he spent in Germany. Many of the rest of the attendees are people I know now a little bit, or used to know. There were also many guests I had never seen before.

A fitting tribute, one of countless thousands of tributes to 1517 across the world in 2017.

Oh! And the Luther impersonator. How can there be a Luther Party without a Luther impersonator?

Here he is. "Luther enters the building":

Luther preaches! The people listen:

Lots else happened as well. There was one guest, who may be related to me, who seemed to be heckling or teasing Luther, all in good fun: I am quite sure Luther didn't mind.

Oh, and an "indulgence peddler" was also active before dinner, wandering around selling them in a big basket. I managed to procure one which gives me "Permission to not attend one meeting you really don't want to attend."

Among many others, told E.S., an Australian I know who is in Korea for the year, about the Luther party. E.S. was impressed and replied that if there is one thing the world needs more of, it is "more Luther impersonators."

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Post-358: Hundred-Dollar Bill

10/21/2017

An ATM at a 7-11 gave me a one-hundred-dollar bill today, a first-ever experience for me.

It did not give me the option of what denomination bill I wanted but just thrust the hundred-dollar bill at me. It then beeped in annoyance that I wasn't quicker on the draw, and then was done with me.

Since when have ATMs stocked hundreds? I ask.

As any true American knows, only criminals (drug dealers) and ignorant foreign tourists ever carry hundred dollar bills. Cashiers are known to reject them; even when accepted, he who pays with a hundred-dollar bill is viewed with suspicion. I have always understood/felt this stigma against hundreds. In fact, growing up I recall never even seeing a hundred-dollar bill, with one exception.

I remember the hundred-dollar bill as a reference point in the distant and mysterious world described by the rap music of the late 1990s, music we were all exposed to. Rappers used the word 'Benjamin' to refer to hundreds ("It's All About the Benjamins," circa 1997-1998; they were implicitly bragging about dealing drugs, which fueled a high-life with hundred-dollar bills, drug earnings, flowing freely).

This puts the hundred-dollar bill way outside any mainstream use for people of my generation or older. Getting this hundred-dollar bill at the ATM leads me to ask whether this social prejudice has changed; are people born in the 2000s, now in K-12 schooling, going to be much less prone to this prejudice against the 'Benjamin'? Or will an emergent anti-cash prejudice reinforce the anti-hundred prejudice?

The first time I ever saw a hundred-dollar bill.
An anecdote. An eight-year-old me: enthusiastic about doing well in 2nd grade, involved in speculation with others about whether ghosts inhabited the boys' bathroom at school, keen to play soccer at 'recess' after lunch, and a daily rider of the school bus with many peers. A character called Hosmann, a friend at the time, rode the same bus. Hosmann, on the bus one day, produced a hundred-dollar bill out of his backpack. He proudly showed the bill off to other students, including me.

Second-grade students, of course, don't even carry cash beyond something like a dollar and a few coins for school cafeteria lunch money. Hosmann was of Bolivian origin. He had odd turns-of-phrase in English (he would say "twist" instead of "turn"). How did he procure this hundred-dollar bill? I presume he pilfered it from home, from his mom, to show off to his peers. Why did he think it a great idea to flash it around on the school bus? A bad sign for where he was headed in later years. I recall his tendency to giggle at everything. I recall him giggling whenever a student saw the hundred that day, which he kept half-concealed in his backpack.

This little experience, around the middle 1990s, made such an impression on the eight-year-old me that I still remember it. A hundred-dollar bill! It may as well have been an artifact from the lost city of Atlantis. I remember criticizing Hosmann to other students at the time for this recklessness.

I cannot remember much else about the school-bus experience from that year. This experience stands out. (Side anecdote: The only other thing I can now clearly pull out of my memory about that year's school bus is Oscar the Bus Driver, Hispanic, perhaps Salvadorean, a fat man always keen to joke around with students. He acquired the endearing nickname "the Garbage Man" among the student-passengers, which he didn't mind. This came from a game he would play in which he or students would point to someone outside on the sidewalk or street and say "That is you in the future!" He would give as good as he got. It must have been that once a student was playing this game when a garbage truck came around at an (in)opportune time; the nickname stuck.)

So what of the origin of the American anti-hundred-dollar-bill prejudice? I am guessing that it was probably considered too risky due to its high value, especially when street crime rose from the mid-1960s. Before that, it was probably also stigmatized as an unnecessarily-high-value bill. However! Both of these factors (street robbery, as of the 2010s, and the real value of the $100 bill today, accounting for inflation) have declined:

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' inflation calculator,

$100 in October 1957 equals $870 today (October 2017).
$100 in October 1977 equals $400 today.
$100 in October 1997 equals $150 today.
$100 in October 2017 equals less than four hours of work (gross pay) for the average worker ($25/hour in 2015).

So maybe our anti-hundred-dollar-bill prejudice should be discarded as an anachronism.

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Post-357: Young Metternich

10/17/2017

Austria's 2017 general election has come and gone, following Germany's a month ago. The key issue in both elections was the 2015-2016 Migrant Crisis, disgruntlement over which appears to have energized large numbers and shifted the political discourse to the right; turnout was high. In Austria's case, parties of the right will have over two-thirds of the seats in the new legislature, and that is with proportional representation.

The age of the new Austrian Chancellor has been the main coverage of the election I have seen. It is amazing, actually, that he is so young. The German press has called this character a 'Young Metternich' ever since he became Foreign Minister, at age 27, a few years ago. He is now 31.

Sebastian Kurz (b. 1986), is Austria's Minister of Foreign Affairs [Dec. 2013 to Present], and Head of the Austrian People's Party (OVP) from mid 2017. His party will control 34% of seats in the legislature as the largest party, and Kurz will soon be Chancellor, the youngest head of government in the world.

Sebastian Kurz

The original Metternich (1773-1859) is characterized as a political genius who dominated Austrian politics from the 1810s to the 1840s, starting, as Kurz has, as Foreign Minister.

Metternich's great achievement is the preservation of Austrian power. At that time, Austria was a true power, a major power, but could have disappeared after the Napoleonic disruption. Metternich gave the Austrian Empire another century of life, for better of worse. The Austria of that era was a multi-national, pan-central-European empire with a German ruling minority and a long-established royal family (the Hapsburgs). It era represented a Catholic, multi-ethnic, 'multicultural' alternative model to north-German Protestant 'Prussianism' based in Berlin. (Having long since lost the struggle against Berlin, Austrian/Hapsburg power ended forever in 1918, after the loss of legitimacy caused by its poor performance in the war and an embarrassing-and-obvious dependence on Germany from summer 1914 onward (actually earlier). With Vienna discredited and totally unable to suppress ethnic secession movements, the pan-central-European 'Austria' fell apart and this new German-Austria, as we know it today, was born.)

The 'Young Metternich' appellation for Kurz doesn't make much sense, to me. The Austria of today is, unlike its imperial predecessor namesake, a very small state (7.5 million citizens in a Europe of 750 million). Also critically for this comparison, modern Austria is, by tradition, not a player in international politics. It is not now and never has been a NATO member, and, for a Western country, was quite a late entrant into the EU (1995, about forty years late).

Kurz and Metternich might be compared in broader terms. Metternich is credited not just with preserving/restoring Austrian power after the Napoleonic crisis, but with being a/the central figure in doing the same for the whole of Europe's quasi-aristocratic order which was seriously threatened, discredited, and injured during Napoleonic period. A lot of 'centrists' around today's Europe dream of a figure to play this role of defending the European post-1945 order of social-democractic liberal democracy in a time it is (widely believed to be) "under threat."

Skeptics would say that Kurz is not such a figure, even discounting the small size and disengagement of Austria, as he led his party to a 7.5% popular vote gain using, many have said, a watered-down version of the rhetoric of the insurgent Austrian Freedom Party (FPO). The latter is a party of the populist-nationalist right, whose campaign was based on slogans like "Stop the Islamization of Austria."

"A new style. It's time."

Who will be Kurz's coalition partner?

He can form a 'coalition of the Center' with the Social Democrats (SPO), or he can rule in a right-wing coalition with the FPO. If the latter coalition governs, Austria will seem to have entered the 'Viktor Orban' Wing of European politics.

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Post-356: Unlimited Economic Growth Forever

10/15/2017

There is a sense among economists, I would propose, that they constitute a latter-day priestly class ruling over the destiny of civilization regardless of who sits on the throne of overt political power, thus that the priestly (economist) class is above the political class. This priestly economist class sees itself as responsible for the steering of society in the right direction, as responsible for pleasing the gods, for performing the proper rituals, for overseeing that the holy teachings be obeyed to a sufficient degree that the good times go on and the wrath of the gods be averted.

This priestly class has its own debates over theological specifics. The long-dominant faction within the priestly class holds to the doctrine of salvation through "unlimited growth through free markets and technology." Different subfactions propose different paths for how this exactly works.

In the dominant view today, as I understand it, salvation comes through the noble efforts of that chosen few who "work in the field of ideas." It is this special group that increases economic growth forever and delivers us from the evil of Malthus' imagination. Economists propose that a society can (through policy) allocate workers into one of two fields: "creation of objects" ('doers') versus "creation of ideas" ('thinkers'). The "ideas people" actually do not create any wealth/output at all for the time being, but spend their time thinking of new ideas. Their continual thinking of ideas constitutes, in effect, a spiritual exercise akin to monks praying on a mountaintop. The ideas people produce a certain small number of good ideas which take hold. These lay the groundwork for growth in the future, years or decades later. The fewer people "working in ideas," the lower the long-term growth. Thus society needs to encourage more people to work in the field of ideas.

Another faction, out of fashion among the high priestly class, rejects the tenet of maximization of growth as the animating civilizational goal in the first place. They say that economies tending towards a "steady state" may be inevitable, and may not even be a bad thing.

When allegorized as a priestly ruling elite's efforts to steer the course of civilization and internal debates about how to do it, economics sounds exciting, The study of economics as I have known it is rather not like this. I have known it as a drab muddling through of a series of manipulations of highly abstract equations and graphs. One must memorize them.

I can't help but think economics (as I have known it, September 2016 to Present) amounts to the learning of a little code language that one will never use again (i.e., inevitably forgotten soon after the final exam), something like learning a foreign or dead language to read one's religion's holy scriptures (to touch back on the allegory). The kind of equation-manipulations I mean look like this:

That is pure gibberish to most of us. Perhaps a foreign language in some unknown script...

As for unlimited growth forever: It does seem to be the way we see the world. It does seem to inform everything else we think, we 'modern' (and 'postmodern') people. It seems to have been so for generations, even centuries. Since when? I suppose since the Industrial Revolution in earnest, maybe with origins in the Enlightenment. It is tempting to believe it, too, for one thing because it seems true from empirical data for more than two centuries now in the West.

I perceive that more have been questioning this model in recent decades, for various reasons: Unlimited growth forever? What does that mean? Are we sure it's true? Is it not folly to assume that trends in the age of cheap fossil-fuel energy will hold true forever? Are we sure we even want unlimited growth forever?

But this "dissident faction" still remains on the margins (really it is several factions united by some kind of opposition to, or skepticism of, the long-reigning Unlimited Growth Forever idea). The dissident voices are just more conspicuous than before. A quip from the 1970s, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell," captures a main current of this dissident view.

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Post-355: "Chinese Government of Beijing is Rogue Government"

10/13/2017

The Chinese students here (a graduate school in Washington, D.C. at which I study) tend to kneejerkingly defend the Chinese government whenever it is even implicitly criticized in some venue, as if they were paid agents of their state. (Some, of course, will be 'paid agents of their state,' government officials and things.) Anyway, this kind of thing is not well received. The Chinese students here, taken as a whole, are generally seen as politically drab "party line" (Communist Party) people. Not all are exactly like this. A large number are. The rest seem to be politically neutral.

So we have a Chinese Student political spectrum ranging from "extremely pro-regime," to "highly pro-regime," to "moderately pro-regime," with a further contingent of "silent." There are no dissidents.

What must go through their minds when they see actual anti-Communist demonstrations:

This is in front of the White House about May 2017. The head demonstrator of this small platoon, a short woman with poor English syntax and a bullhorn, kept repeating: "Chinese government is mafia! Chinese government is mafia!" She occasionally let 'mafia' have a rest and substituted one or the other of the words 'evil' or 'criminal.'

I cannot judge the merits of their issue as I do not understand it. Many neutral onlookers probably saw them as purely cranks or malcontents, especially due to their incoherent sloganeering and grammatical deficiencies; if cranks is what they are, they are far from alone in the civic space in front of the White House. (There is one Flat Earth activist who often shows up with whom a friend and I once talked for a few minutes.)

A policeman came by to silence the bullhorn after a few minutes, but the 'Beijing is Rogue Government' squad remained.

I am glad that the street in front of the White House is closed to traffic. Its enormous pedestrian- and bicycle-only space creates a kind of Town Square atmosphere. One anchor of this is the perennial protest tent across from the White House. The main issue has always been nuclear weapons. Over the years that protest tent has accumulated many other issues. It is, today, completely covered in various slogans. I once talked to the guy manning that tent once. He didn't even know what some of the issues were. One, anyway, it should come as no surprise, is 'Tibet.'

The Tibet issue is one of the few that unites the entire political spectrum in the USA; to be angrily anti-Tibet puts you in an odd place, as both U.S. Left and Right are pro-Tibet with no domestic U.S. faction I know of (or can imagine) that is anti-Tibet. I have heard Chinese students, though, unaware perhaps of how isolating such talk is within U.S. political discourse, refer to the Tibet movement as a terrorist movement. (The Communist Party approves.)

One day, perhaps it was late 2016, someone in a class told me one of our Chinese classmates was a Communist Party member. I was a little surprised because I didn't see her as one of these 'enforcers' for the Beijing government I have alluded to above. She seemed to me rather one of those ambitious-and-smart-but-somehow-uncurious types (this is, for me, a tragic type). I saw her, further, as someone who who didn't take strong stands on things, didn't fully develop independent ideas, didn't challenge things (she would often ask softball questions to the teacher that I found a waste of time), and she didn't have the kind of awareness of issues I'd expect an equivalent Westerner to have. She was, though, someone who did always want to show how smart she was. Is this the political type that today's technocratic China has produced en masse?

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Post-354: Grandfather in 1943

10/12/2017

"The year was 1943," as they say; the Glenn Miller Orchestra was at the top of the music charts.

If you were in the right place at the right time, in summer 1943, you could have caught glimpse of my grandfather in the uniform of the U.S. Army Air Corps. His term of service began in June 1943. I think he was conscripted. He would have been passed over in the first waves in 1942 due to having a dependent wife and son and his occupation (farmer). He spent most of the period from later 1943 to the end of the war (May 1945) in England, fixing airplanes, or so is my understanding. When the war was over, he returned to farming in Iowa, as he and his family had been doing for several generations (except for a brief stint in Colorado).

My Iowa cousin, J., looks a lot like our grandfather in these pictures.

J. would, himself, serve in the U.S. Army some six decades after our grandfather (the 2000s). I haven't seen much of J. recently but I remember him telling me, after his discharge from active service some years ago, that he hadn't really liked being in the army. I have heard similar things from a lot of people. Sometimes they also add something like "well, but, you know, it was a great experience to have gone through all the same."

I saw my grandfather often when I was ages 0-13 or so, but don't now recall him saying anything about his military service.

A farm scene. The baby is my uncle.

My grandfather died in 2007. I don't recall how I came to find these photographs. I think I came across them in 2014, probably in the possession of my father.

Who took these pictures? It may have been my grandmother. He seems to have been on leave visiting her, anyway.

Some letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother at this time survive. He would have written them while stationed at some airbase in England as a U.S. Army Air Corps mechanic. They remained at the house in Iowa until they died. Seventy years after their writing, I had the chance to read one of these letters. It was nothing special, in fact; just saying 'Hi,' really. He talked about on-base friends he had and that the big pastime was going to the movies on off-time. He wrote the name of a movie he'd recently seen. He was never near any active fighting that I know of.

(On the custom of writing letters by hand, on paper, and mailing them. It makes me think what it takes to ensure something you write survives into the distant future. A lot of it may really be luck, hence our use of the phrase "[this document] survives," as everyday life constitutes a constant storm of destruction of small things like small letters; most of what we do ends up discarded or otherwise lost, sooner or later. Losing what we've written may actually be more of a risk under higher technology: The great majority of my own digital correspondences, since about the late 1990s when I was first online as a child, are now gone without a trace. Early email accounts, passwords forgotten or deactivated with little or nothing saved; instant messenger programs, long lost; school email accounts, inaccessible to students upon graduation; and so on. I can only hope that the contents of this humble blog are not lost too easily.)

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Post-353: Herr Genscher Speaks (1989): Viewed from the Present

9/30/2017

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I am studying the German language again after a long hiatus. The last time I formally studied in a classroom setting was 2008. It surprises me how much I can still do in that language.

In my class are two good-humored Greeks I think their mid 20s. One spent a few years in the U.S. as a boy.

This week and next, the teacher's topic for us is the final year or so of the German Democratic Republic (fall 1989 to fall 1990). Their system, in retrospect, was showing serious signs of strain by August and September 1989; the anti-communist silent protests centered on the Lutheran churches had been ongoing for years Leipzig and Dresden but began to mushroom in October 1989.

The marchers' two principal chants were "Wir sind Das Volk" ['We are the People,' an odd slogan in some ways; some today, long after the days of communist rhetoric, may not realize that their slogan deliberately mocked communist rhetoric about "the People"] and "Gorbi! Gorbi!" Gorbi" [Gorbachev, seen as a savior]); the Berlin Wall was opened by the authorities on November 9th, 1989; the GDR formally continued to exist for another eleven months and held an election which featured a young Angela Merkel as a candidate for the first time; she attached herself quickly to the ruling CDU machine, =inherited this very machine later on, and has been Chancellor 2005 to present at the head of this machine -- likely now through 2021, after the latest German election).

What was the "key point" in the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic? The state security services choosing not to suppress October demonstrations was clearly vital. October may already be too late a date, though.

Today the German teacher spent some time on the so-called Genscher Rede [Speech] of September 30, 1989 at the West German Embassy in Prague. That is 28 years ago today. At that time, hundreds and then thousands of East Germans had camped out on the West German embassy grounds in Prague hoping for permission to emigrate to the West. The fact that the Czech-Communist security services allowed them to simply jump the embassy fences is another sign in retrospect that the end was near.

We watched the speech. Genscher's "speech" was just a few seconds long and delivered in a mood reminiscent of a team winning the World Cup.

Genscher gave the speech on the embassy balcony overlooking thousands -- some youths (above left) seem to have climbed onto the window sills or balcony to hear it.

This is how a Wiki writer describes Genscher's speech:

"He announced that he had reached an agreement with the Communist Czechoslovak government that the refugees could leave: "We have come to you to tell you that today, your departure ..." (German: "Wir sind zu Ihnen gekommen, um Ihnen mitzuteilen, dass heute Ihre Ausreise ..."). After these words, the speech was drowned in cheers."

Hans-Dietrich Genscher (1927-2016) was actually himself an 'East German,' having been born, raised, and lived there until 1952, when he emigrated to West Germany at age 25; in other words, he was an example of the East German state's problem of losing good people to the much-more-attractive U.S.-backed West German machine. They lost millions this way in the early years. Then, on Sept. 30, 1989, Genscher brought in thousands more. This was a blow the East German state could not handle.

Genscher rose to West German Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor (1982-1992) under Helmut Kohl and was previously West German Interior Minister (1969-1974) under SPD Chancellor Willy Brandt). He rose in politics within the Free Democratic Party (FDP), a freemarket-liberal party. In the old days when West Germany's CDU was still widely considered primarily a "Catholic Party" by Germans, the FDP was a safe place for Protestants on the right. (Almost all pre-communist 'East Germans' were, at least nominally.) Genscher was a high government minister under both left- and right-wing governments.

The Genscher speech viewed from almost thirty years later:

There was an federal (Bundestag) election in Germany last weekend. I think two things can be said about the Genscher Speech legacy given the results of the election.

(1) The ruling apparatus and its system may not have been as unpopular as this kind of imagery suggests. The "necoCommunist" party called Linke (which is descended directly from the East German ruling party) got 18% of the eastern vote, and generally does even better than that at the regional level (generally 20-25%). See, e.g., Post-246: Here Comes Bodo Ramelow.

(2) Refugee Imagery and its Political Discontents. I know that today's Germans have two political/historical memories of Germans-as-refugees: This case is one, this imagery of thousands crowding the embassy grounds in Prague and elsewhere in 1989; the other is earlier but even more important, I think, as it is a kind of 'foundation myth' of the Federal Republic [West German state] itself: Following WWII, tens of millions across Europe were homeless and many were expelled or could not return for some reason, i.e. refugees. This included something like 12 million Germans from points east of the GDR's eastern border. These expellees formed a large part of the Federal Republic's population.

These two memories may have been what impelled Chancellor Merkel to suddenly and without consultation announce an open-border policy for refugees in late August 2015, which soon saw 1.5 million Islamic refugees enter Germany. German birth rates are low and the refugees were mainly young and male: One estimate has it that this 2015-2016 refugee wave alone constitutes 10% of the military-age population of Germany; in one fell swoop. This decision seems to have caused a significant exodus of support from Merkel's party, to the FDP and to a brand-new party to the right of the CDU. For the first time, the Bundestag has a party that threatens the CDU from the right. Their platform is dominated by: "Stop Merkel's Refugee Policy."

The new party, the AfD, which was co-led by a man (Alexander Gauland) who left the CDU after forty years over the refugee crisis, did very well in the eastern states, even coming in as the largest party in some districts and a strong second in most of the rest. (The ruling CDU got 27.5% of the vote in the east to the AfD's 22%.)

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Post-352: Twenty Thousand Photographs

8/17/2016

Photographs I Have Taken
2013: 6,847
2014: 5,570
2015: 5,613
2016 through August 16th: 3,727
= 21,757 photos taken in 44.5 months, or about 490 per month.

Some hundreds of these appear on this very website. They direct a lot of the traffic that comes from strangers to what is now called Yule-Tide.com.

This seems like a lot of pictures. I don't remember at all what the great majority were. How could I? Why did I take them?

I do know exactly why I took about a thousand of those taken in year 2014 (nearly 20% of that year's total). They were very explicitly taken to "preserve the past." I photographed many of the papers, writings, and other miscellany of my grandfather in Connecticut who died eighteen years ago. He was born a hundred years ago this year.

His files were then still intact. Without going into details, in 2014 I had a fear that everything might be thrown away at any moment. When I visited Connecticut on one of my trips there in 2014, I figured I could prevent the total loss of it all by photographing, no matter what comes later. Then, I reasoned, I could transcribe some of his writings and upload them to a website that I could create for that purpose. This has not yet been done.

There were many good writings, all of which were bound to be lost. I had the power in my hands, literally, to preserve them. His writings were things like letters-to-the-editor, essays, short stories, newsletters for the clubs he was in, and of course his full-length comedic novel from the ant's perspective (two animation movies quite similar to his novel were produced in the late 1990s; he had his manuscript done already by the mid 1970s; among his files there was much correspondence with literary agents trying to get that novel published). There were also speeches he gave, personal histories and reminiscences, and travel writings, such as from his trip to East Germany in 1979.

He was also a photographer and a longtime member of a local camera club. My attempts to take digital photos with my phone camera of his old black-and-white photos, some from the 1930s, were not totally satisfactory. There were some photographs around even older, mostly family pictures. Of those he took, one interesting set shows him with buddies in the 1938-1940 period with the Connecticut National Guard. The guardsmen, himself included, are photographed horsing around, often with shirts off, and grinning. This was a military outfit, even if in peacetime, so this surprised me. My grandfather had lied about his eyesight (it was below standard for the army) and when they figured it out, they kicked him out. That was before the war began...

Then there was the slide projector. My cousin B.W. helped get it working, after some difficulty. It was a 1970s model. It was my first time using one of those. There were boxes full of slides and was able to photograph some very nicely. He was a comedic writer and a comedic photographer. He made entire visual stories out his slides. The one pre-loaded in the projector was made with the help of a local family, a boy and his mother. I could recreate the slideshow on these pages. It hasn't been seen by very many people in recent decades. I think it was made in the 1970s as well.

The only failure of this historical preservationist endeavor was in my cousin B.W. and I wasting an hour or two trying to get the film projector to work. We did finally get it to work, whirring along and projecting those "moving pictures" our grandfather had filmed decades before we were born. The reel we'd spooled in was of some kind of trip they;d taken, perhaps in the 1950s. The case was marked 'Florida.' We'd seen a minute of it, a scene filmed in the airplane, a scene of palm trees swaying, a scene of people walking on the tarmac after getting off the plane -- then -- poof! -- the light bulb burned out. It was not easily replaceable at all and they'd stopped making them long ago.

The burning out of that lightbulb, when I look back on it, is a clear metaphor for the whole endeavor, for trying to hold onto the past, or maybe to "find" the past, but being unable to do so.

Is remembering the past now much easier than before? It's true that enormous amounts are now being recorded -- Three years of my occasional writings on these pages, for one thing. Then there is the Facebook behemoth. For all that sort of thing, though, there really is no perfect repository of "what has actually occurred." For instance, despite the thousands of words on these pages, written by me, rather little of my "life," really, has shown up here, just what I choose to write about. I prefer writing, when time allows, about other subjects than my day-to-day life, though aspects of my own life sometimes play supporting roles.

Then there is the ephemerality of the Internet. Much of the Internet that I remember from the old days has vanished totally, including my own first-ever webpage, a tribute page to The Simpsons that I made about year 1999 when I was in middle school (while trying to learn HTML). The second website I tried making, about year 2001, has also long since vanished (no big loss). My early email accounts have, likewise, all vanished with no access, that I know of, to the archives. Various discussion forums I used to visit in the mid-2000s are now totally gone, with all posts lost.

It would seem that memories themselves are like this, too. Not all survive. Even to recall, in the evening, precisely what one did that very same morning can be difficult. How, then, can we hope to really remember one year ago, ten years ago, and so on. At some point, things fogs up, and at some point beyond that, things vanish. This can happen quickly. As soon as events happen, they start slipping away.

What, then, is "history"? It can't be "telling us what happened", because of the slide towards the loss of most information that starts as soon as something occurs. Much more can be said on this and the historian E.H. Carr said it well.

Is the attempt to "preserve the past," in general, to fight a hopeless rearguard action against a superior enemy force that will eventually win? Yet still we fight.

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Post-351: "Falling Flower Petals" [Korean Poem, My Translation]

8/16/2016

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내가 최근에 알게된《낙화》라는 감동적인 시를 한번 영어로 번역해보겠다. 우선 이 시를 소개한 사람한테 고맙다고 하고 싶다. 감사해요, M씨.

이 시를 쓴 시인의 이름은 이형기(李炯基)다. 진주에서 1933년에 태어났고 1956년에 동국대학교를 졸업하고 2005에 돌아가셨다. 검색해봤더니 낙화라는 시가 1963년에 출판한 것 같다. (그런데 출판년보다는 언제 처음 쓴 것을 알고 싶다...) 이 시의 내용을 이해하기가 좀 어렵긴 어려운데 사실 모국어로도 그런거죠. 당연, 보통 길 아니고 시 때문이죠. 나 같은 번역하려고 하는 사람이 꼼꼼하게 최선을 다할 수 있지만, 이중적 의미를 갖는 원래 나온 단어와 표현들이 같은 뉘앙스로 번역할 수 없는게 분명하다. 아무튼, 어찔 수 는 것이다. 내가 최선을 다했다. 내가 번역한 것을 읽으실 분께도 고마워요.

I am translating a poem by a Korean poet named Lee Hong-Ki (1933-2005). The poem's name in Korean is "Nak-Hwa" (낙화, 落花, these characters meaning "fall" and "flower"). This is entirely my own translation with the help of various dictionaries.

낙화 / 이형기 시인

가야 할 때가 언제인가를
분명히 알고 가는 이의
뒷모습은 얼마나 아름다운가.

봄 한철
격정을 인내한
나의 사랑은 지고 있다.

분분한 낙화……
결별이 이룩하는 축복에 싸여
지금은 가야 할 때,

무성한 녹음과 그리고
머지않아 열매 맺는
가을을 향하여

나의 청춘은 꽃답게 죽는다.
헤어지자
섬세한 손길을 흔들며
하롱하롱 꽃잎이 지는 어느 날

나의 사랑, 나의 결별,
샘터에 물 고이듯 성숙하는
내 영혼의 슬픈 눈.
____________________

Falling Flower Petals
By Lee Hyong-Ki [1963]

To know, with certainty,
when it's time to go.
Now that is a thing of true beauty to behold.

Springtime.
My love has long persevered
through passions,
but is now, as the petals of a flower,
descending to the earth.

Oh, that sweet fragrance of falling petals....
With kind words, it is ended. Farewell.
The time to go is now.

Behold, greenery and lush shade,
There will soon be fruit for the taking,
as the autumn is coming.

My youth, much like a flower, dies.
One fine day, as we part ways,
I see the waving of a delicate hand,
and the falling, one after another,
of flower petals.

My love, the parting of ways.
What is left is as tranquil as a pool of still water.
The sad eyes of my matured soul look on.
_____________________

이형기, Lee Hyong-ki, 1960s?

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Post-350: "Scolded by the Thief": China's Resentment of THAAD Missiles in Korea [News Translated]

8/9/2016

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It was during the now-forgotten MERS Virus Panic of Summer 2015 that I first heard of "THAAD" (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, a U.S.-made anti-ballistic missile system).

Public places in Seoul were largely empty at the time, with the great masses afraid of inhaling a gulp of MERS-tainted air and staying home. Schools and hagwons were closed by the thousands; cafes were deserted; tourist spots, likewise. The TV news at the time consisted of wall-to-wall MERS coverage, as more infected persons were discovered and some began to die. A war panic, without the war.

Anti-government protestors, though, kept vigil, as they always do, at the broad avenue in front of Gwanghwamun [광화문] in central Seoul. As so many of those normally out and about were hunkering down during the MERS Panic, these protestors were more visible than usual. I was there. I was not particularly afraid of MERS and used the opportunity to take full advantage of the emptiness of the streets. (The final MERS death toll was 36, almost all of them elderly; I don't think there was ever evidence of any sustained general airborne transmission.)

I recall vividly two things from Gwanghwamun on that MERS days: (1) The unusual daytime silence, and (2) The handful of predictably dour protestors, some masked to prevent MERS. One of the protestors' placards had the word THAAD on it. "What's THAAD?" The placard called for U.S. military expulsion from Korean soil. I guessed THAAD must be something the U.S. military was doing. (See post-318, "A Glance at the Gwanghwamun Protestors, ". I will repost the photo here:)

Photograph taken by me, June 2015. See here Post #318: The Gwanghwamun Protestors

(Note #1: Some would call the group behind that burgundy placard above "친북성향" ["Rather Friendly Towards North Korea"], a kind of political slur in South Korea. These groups are worth watching because they are political spearhead groups, by which I mean that they are the first to speak up on issues that often get traction. Their influence is much greater than the vote totals that their explicit parties can secure.) (Note #2: THAAD will, as far as I can tell, be under ROK-Army control and not USFK control, so the sign is factually incorrect in that it insinuates the USFK is bringing in THAAD. [See Post-#318 for a translation of the slogans on the placard.])

A few weeks ago, the THAAD deal between the U.S. and ROK was finalized and the deployment process begun. There was some opposition from the left-wing Democratic Party [더불어민주당], who performed well in the recent elections, but the issue was never put to a vote in the National Assembly. It was simply a government initiative. Full operational readiness for THAAD, they say, will be at hand before the end of 2016.

My impression in mid-2015 was that THAAD had very low awareness in the Korean public mind, and Koreans I asked about it had never heard of it. By this summer (2016), a year later, it has become perhaps the top international political story in Korea, and a significant one for East Asia as a whole.

China has been publicly resentful of THAAD.

The Korean Democratic Party organized a visit to reassure China about THAAD, sending some of its top parliamentary figures. The visit may not have achieved much, according to a news report which I will translate here:

From SBS News. Story here, with video

더민주 의원 6명 방중...'사드 비공개 좌담회'

<앵커> 더불어민주당 소속 의원 6명이 논란 속에 2박 3일간의 사드 관련 중국 방문 일정을 시작했습니다. 중국에 도착한 의원들은 당내에서도 엇갈리는 찬반 논란이 부담스러웠던지 베이징대 교수들과의 좌담회를 비공개로 열었습니다. 베이징 편상욱 특파원이 보도합니다.

Six Democratic Party Representatives in China for Closed-Door Talks on THAAD [Translated by Peter] August 8th, 2016

<Anchor> Amid the controversy over THAAD, six representatives of the Democratic Party have begun a three-day official visit to China. Despite the division within the Democratic Party itself over this issue, the party reached an agreement to hold closed-door talks with Chinese academics on the matter. Our Beijing correspondent Pyun Sang-Wook reports.

<기자> 오늘(8일) 오전 베이징 공항에 도착한 더불어민주당 의원 6명은 이번 중국방문에 집중된 이목을 의식한 듯 매우 신중한 모습을 보였습니다.

<Reporter> Six representatives of the Democratic Party today arrived at the Beijing Airport, and all seemed determined to concentrate fully on the task at hand during their official visit to China.

[김병욱/더불어민주당 의원 : 한중간의 관계가 중요하죠. 지금까지 잘 발전돼왔고, 앞으로도 좀 더 보다 성숙된 모습으로 발전하기 위해서….]

[Kim Byung-Wook / Democratic Party National Assembly Member: "Korean-Chinese Relations are, of course, important. They have been developing well. Moving forward, we intend to improve ties even more and develop a more mature relationship..."]

하지만 공항엔 중국 기자가 단 한 명도 나타나지 않았습니다. 한국 야당 의원들의 방중을 연일 대서특필하던 중국 관영 언론의 태도와는 사뭇 다른 것입니다.

But in fact not a single member of the Chinese media appeared at the airport. Past official visits by Korean opposition figures received headlines in the Chinese state media. The reception this time stands in marked contrast.

도착 첫 일정은 베이징대 교수들과의 간담회였습니다. 주제는 한반도 사드 배치 등 한·중 간 안보 현안이었습니다. 민감한 주제를 감안한 듯 3시간 동안의 간담회는 전면 비공개로 진행됐습니다.

The first item on the agenda: A round-table discussion with academics at Beijing University. THAAD deployment on the Korean Peninsula was one of the topics discussed, as were others related to ROK-Chinese relations and security. The sensitive nature of topics under discussion meant that the three-hour-long talks were held behind closed doors.

[박 정/더불어민주당 의원 : 사드가 배치되는 과정에서 소통 부재가 제일 컸다. 두 번째는 양국의 언론들이 너무 이 문제를 키운 게 없잖아 있다 이런 말씀을 (베이징대 교수들이) 하셨습니다.]

[Park Jung / Democratic Party National Assembly Member: "The biggest problem in this whole THAAD matter is the lack of communication. The second problem, according to the esteemed Chinese academics with whom we spoke, is the press -- in both our countries the press bears some of the responsibility for this problem."]

인민일보 자매지인 환구시보는 청와대가 '사드 배치로 한중 관계를 긴장시킨 책임을 북한과 중국에 전가하는 건 적반하장'이라는 내용의 칼럼을 실었습니다.

The Global Times, an organ of the Chinese People's Daily, published an op-ed saying that Seoul is damaging ties with China through THAAD deployment. It accused Seoul of hypocrisy and bad faith in accusing China and North Korea of being in the wrong, using a Chinese proverb [적반하장, 賊反荷杖, "Thief Instead Scolds"] in which a thief scolds his victim rather than being scolded himself, comparing Seoul to the thief.

하지만 나머지 관영 언론들은 연일 맹공을 퍼붓던 사드 문제에 대해 오늘은 자제하는 모습을 보였습니다. 중국이 사드 공세의 속도 조절에 나선 건 지, 좀 더 지켜봐야 할 것으로 보입니다.

베이징에서 SBS 편상욱입니다.

But the relentless attacks by the Chinese state media seem able to be brought under control. The pace of China's attacks on THAAD may soon start to be reigned in. We have to wait and see how the situation develops.

In Beijing, this is Pyun Sang-Wook reporting.

Final thoughts:

1.) The Democratic Party of Korea (더불어민주당) is, curiously, is still called the "opposition party" [야당] in the Korean press despite winning more seats than the government party (Saenuri Party 새누리당) in the April 2016 election. No party now has a majority.

2.) I recently re-read the first-ever account of Korea written by a Westerner, the journal of Hendrik Hamel [published 1658]. I can't help but be reminded by this Korean delegation of the regular tributary visits and payments that Chosun Korea made to China. Hamel talks about these some length in his book. (Hamel and the other shipwrecked Dutchmen were held against their will in the Kingdom of Chosun [i.e., Korea], and the Chosun king was very afraid of the Chinese learning about the Westerners. He locked them up when a Chinese delegation visited.)

3.) Whether you agree that a walk down the above path of historical analogy is valid or not, at least you'll agree that this THAAD issue is a metaphor for bigger things.

4.) A similar deployment just twenty-five years ago would never have generated a high-profile official state visit to China no matter how angry China was -- I say this with certainty because until August 1992 there were no official ROK-PRC relations at all and thus no official state visits.

5.) Say unification occurs. Unified Korea would share a long border with Manchuria, China. Some Koreans feel that they have historical claim to parts of Manchuria.

I have known some ethnic Koreans from China [조선족] who have come to Korea. One, born in the 1970s, is married to my friend M.P., now in Texas. Another, P.G.H., a male born in 1988, gave up on Korea in late 2015 and returned to China because the jobs he was getting were of the "handing out flyers" sort. His Korean was rather worse than mine. The reason he gave us, though, for giving up on Korea, was that all his friends were in China. Another ethnic-Korean-from-China, K.J.H., born 1991, majored in linguistics in China, briefly taught English there (though we have only ever spoken Korean and she says she knows English only 'academically') and got TOPIK-6 (the highest Korean level) after coming to South Korea last year. She says she can't understand most of the TV news, which makes me feel relieved. These ethnic-Koreans-from-China seem certainly culturally more Chinese, but they may seem something different to Chinese, I don't know.

Anyway, this pool of Koreans-in-China is several million strong.

I was once handed a leaflet in front of Tapgol Park in Jongro, Seoul [종로 탑골공원앞] by a thin and grinning ajeosshi in his fifties or so, the type you'll find somewhere on a mountain trail on a sunny Saturday drinking magkeolli alcohol. Why did he give me, an obvious racial foreigner, his four-page-long Korean-language leaflet? I'm glad he did, but he'd not have been able to know I could read it. The rambling treatise, as far as I could understand it, called for "reclamation" of "our land." This would mean parts of the Chinese provinces of Jilin and Liaoning on the below map, and maybe even some of southern Heilongjiang:

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Post-349: On British Rhetorical Superiority

4/23/2016

I have had the good fortune throughout life to meet many interesting and amazing people from all over the world, and this trend seems to be accelerating in the year 2016. I ought not to squander my good fortune or shirk the responsibilities that come along with it.

I recently met a British journalist based in Korea, author of several history books, and that meeting has, in part, inspired me to make the forthcoming comments.

Now, in fact, I have actually never set foot on UK soil and have, actually, always felt closer kinship with the peoples of the northwestern European mainland despite shallow language differences with the latter and purported linguistic unity with the former. (I have come to realize two things in recent years [1] On American-British linguistic unity: I cannot speak on "native speaker terms" with people from the UK, as my days regularly playing soccer with British people in Incheon, Korea taught me. Very often I stood there unable to follow their conversations... and [2] I have come to appreciate, after some years away, that culture similarity among the kindred peoples of Europe -- despite what we may think or want to think -- is very high.)

I admire the British for their highly-cultivated verbal abilities. It is generally always entertaining to hear a British speaker, on any subject. Take a North American and an Englishman of equal intelligence and background. Despite this "base parity" and despite our shared cultural origins as products of that which we call Western Civilization, we all know that the Englishman will likely have a much better apparent way with words. Why is this? I am not exactly sure.

I have also had occasion to listen to an American pastor (in English) and a German pastor (in German), who share the exact same nominal religious tradition, but in whose presentation I found the American somewhat too unserious, readily sliding into a jokey mode, while the German pastor I found more properly dignified and ultimately, then, a warmer and more engaging.

Is it that Americans have a certain anti-intellectualism that has leveling effect on demonstrated rhetorical ability? Is there a cultural pressure in the present-day USA to not appear "too smart"? Has there always been? How then, does one explain the beautiful rhetoric of the Founding Fathers, of Lincoln?

As to whether present-day American civic life suppresses rhetorical ability (or the demonstration thereof), I can say this, recalling my school days: I am certain that it was true of myself in many contexts. I generally wanted to do well in classes, but I remember writing essays around high school that had deliberate mistakes in them, and even deliberatly poor reasoning at times, to avoid intellectual self-aggrandizement at the cost of my peers, many of whom were not even English native speakers.

Some might dismiss the foregoing paragraph's reminiscence as high school antics by an American boy unsure where he fit in the multiracial maze of a U.S. public school circa the early 2000s. It is also true, though, of adult American sons of privilege, notably George W. Bush, twice elected (once even with a majority of the vote). People mocked him for being such a poor speaker, for fumbling around with words, for saying words that just didn't exist, for being incoherent. Those of my age and older will remember this well. He presented himself as having a much lower IQ than he actually had/has.

There was also the famous case of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's "Unknown Unknowns" speech which has its own Wiki entry now. Rumsfeld was a Princeton graduate and a very sharp man, but he couldn't spin a proper neologism for what he wanted to say (reading it again now, I still am not sure) and he confused audiences far and wide. If Rumsfeld were a product of the British system, ceteris paribus (as a British writer might write; an American would almost always use "all else equal"), he would have come up with something better than "unknown unknowns"!

Before I break this off, let me say that my occasional reading of old newspapers and magazines suggests the "decline of American rhetoric" may be more recent. I am not sure when or how it happened...

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Post-348: "An Empty Chair is What I Am" (1978) [Korean Pop Song, Translated]

4/20/2016

I heard a song on FM radio in Seoul and I've tracked it down:

Title: "Empty Chair" (빈의자).
Artist: Chang Jeanam (장재남).
Era: Late 1970s.

I actually like the tune and the optimistic lyrics/message (see below). Koreans of my age would not readily admit to liking such a song. I am not a Korean.

This song hardly registers on the Internet, with really nothing in English at all that I find, so again I find myself blazing new ground on these digital pages.

Below: Youtube of the song; lyrics; my translation; a friend's comments.

Chang Jeanam

Here is another version:

장재남 / 빈 의자 (1978)

서 있는 사람은 오시오 나는 빈 의자
당신의 자리가 되드리리다
피곤한 사람은 오시오 나는 빈 의자
당신을 편히 쉬게 하리다

두 사람이 와도 괜찮소
세 사람이 와도 괜찮소
외로움에 지친 모든 사람들
무더기로 와도 괜찮소

서 있는 사람은 오시오 나는 빈 의자
당신의 자리가 되드리리다

서 있는 사람은 오시오 나는 빈 의자
당신의 자리가 되드리리다
피곤한 사람은 오시오 나는 빈의자
당신을 편히 쉬게 하리다

두사람이 와도 괜찮소
세사람이 와도 괜찮소
외로움에 지친 모든 사람들
무더기로 와도 괜찮소

서 있는 사람은 오시오 나는 빈 의자
당신의 자리가 되드리리다

Chang Jeanam / Empty Chair (1978)

All you standing people, come on over!
An empty chair is what I am...
and I offer myself up as your seat...
All you tired people, come on over!
An empty chair is what I am.
To let you relax in comfort...

Two people want to come? That's just fine!
Three people want to come? That's just fine!
All those of you tired of being lonely,
Come, pile on! It's just fine.

All you standing people, come on over!
An empty chair is what I am...
I offer myself up as your seat...

All you standing people, come on over!
An empty chair is what I am...
and I offer myself up as your seat...
All you tired people, come on over!
An empty chair is what I am.
To let you relax in comfort...

Two people want to come? That's just fine!
Three people want to come? That's just fine!
All those of you tired of being lonely,
Come, pile on! It's just fine.

All you standing people, come on over!
An empty chair is what I am...
and I offer myself up as your seat...

A Korean friend named L. made some interesting comments to me about the song. This is a Korean who majored in German and with whom I communicate in a mix of German, English, and Korean, as the mood fits. (L.'s Korean name, if written in English initials, is the temperamentally-unsuitable S.H.Y.).

These are L.'s comments on the song (in original German):

"In den 70er Jahren lebten Koreaner in der dunklen Zeit der Diktatur. Deswegen sang die viele Folksong über die Solidarität zwischen den Leuten oder die leuchtende Zukunft." ("In the 1970s, Koreans lived in the dark days of dictatorship. It is for this reason that they sang a lot of folk songs about unity of the people or the bright future.")

L. was born in 1987 and the above reflects the view of that generation, I think. Few Koreans of our generation would admit to liking the "dictatorship" (which ended around the early 1990s), I suppose.

Is it a stretch to impute a political message to this very simple song? Maybe, but this kind of thing is the bread-and-butter of certain academics, isn't it. There is also value in the comments for their own sake, i.e., how young Koreans see their own recent history.

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Post-347: "Self-Portrait" by Yun Dong-Ju [Korean Poem, Translated]

4/18/2016

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I had the pleasure of learning the name Yun Dong-Ju (윤동주) last week. A movie is now out about him and I had the good fortune to see it (the less fortunate part was how little I understood). Yun Dong-Ju is, it seems, one of the most beloved Korean poets of the 20th century. He also has a romantic and "political" (one might say) cachet to the present-day Korean mind because of his early death in a Japanese prison in February 1945 at age 27.

I have decided to translate one of Yun Dong-Ju's poems called Self-Portrait, though I might prefer to translate the title also as Portrait of the Artist. It was written in 1939 and was included by the author in a collection he published with limited circulation in 1941. The collection was republished in 1948 following the author's death and the deceased Yun Dong-Ju became a kind of poet folk hero, it seems.

The below is my own translation. I increasingly find Korean poetry beautiful for its disciplined use of language and layers of implied meanings, but this also makes it a real challenge to translate smoothly.

Self Portrait has an air of mystery to it. Two characters. Thick symbolism. In reading it, many questions come up. This is a self-portrait, is it? Which character is the author? Both? I suppose that is up to us to decide...

Self-Portrait

Yun Dongju [1917-1945] / Poet
[Translated by Me, April 2016]

On my solitary way down from a rocky outcropping,
I seek out a secluded well for a little peek inside.

Inside the well: A bright moon, drifting clouds,
a spread-out sky. A blue breeze blows. It is autumn.

There is also this strapping young lad.
For reasons unclear to me, I feel that I hate this lad.
I turn away to leave and proceed on my way.
Presently, I begin to take pity on the lad.
I go back for another look.
There he is again, still there, just as before.
Again I feel that I hate this lad, and again I take my leave.
Walking away, I come to realize something. I yearn for the lad.

Inside the well: A bright moon, drifting clouds,
a spread-out sky. A blue breeze blows. It is autumn.
As from the recesses of fond memory, there is, also, this lad.

Original Korean:

자화상
윤동주 [1917-1945] / 시인

산모퉁이를 돌아 논가 외딴 우물을
홀로 찾아가선 가만히 들여다봅니다.

우물 속에는 달이 밝고 구름이 흐르고
하늘이 펼치고 파아란 바람이 불고
가을이 있습니다.

그리고 한 사나이가 있습니다.
어쩐지 그 사나이가 미워져 돌아갑니다.
돌아가다 생각하니 그 사나이가 가엾어집니다.
도로 가 들여다보니 사나이는 그대로 있습니다.

다시 그 사나이가 미워져 돌아갑니다.
돌아가다 생각하니 그 사나이가 그리워집니다.

우물 속에는 달이 밝고 구름이 흐르고
하늘이 펼치고 파아란 바람이 불고
가을이 있고 추억처럼 사나이가 있습니다.

Poster for "Dong-Ju" (2016). Yun Dong-Ju is on the left, without glasses. The actor bears a strong resemblance to the real person.

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Post-346: Upset Victory in the 2016 Korean Election

4/17/2016

Yes, I can say that the Korea election result surprised me. I learned it, or at least the early projections, on the bus on the way back from Paju (Wednesday was a holiday). Most other observers were also surprised.

From my Korean contacts, I sense a new political optimism in the form of breaking the democratic tyranny of the two-party duopoly system.

I have been busy and have no time to do any further in-depth commentary, as I'd like to, and as I will get back to.

Final Score
300 seats allocated (majority: 151+)
122 seats: Saenuri Party [right-wing, so-called, governing] (새누리당)
123 seats: Democratic Party [left-wing, so-called; it and its predecessors have been in opposition for almost all of the history of the Republic of Korea since independence in 1948, both during the military rule period and during the past twenty-five years of quasi-democracy] (I have learned they want to be called "the Minjoo Party of Korea" in English). (더불어민주당).
38 seats: People's Party [centrist, so-called, but most seats are due to Jeolla region voters punishing their long standy party]. Party leader, Dr. Ahn Cheol-Soo, also easily won re-election.
6 seats: Justice Party [left-wing] (정의당)
11 seats: Independents. Many of these are expelled members of the Saenuri Party.

The big winner, alas, was Ahn Cheol-Soo. He's got to be a favorite for the presidency now.

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Post-345: K-Pop Says, "Join Us and Vote" [Korea Election 2016]

4/12/2016

Election is tomorrow, Wednesday, and is a holiday. Election day a holiday? What a good idea.

The last I've heard is that the left-wing opposition Democratic Party (더불어민주당) is looking like it may lose more seats than expected in its southwest heartland. If it can't sweep that region, as it usually does, that is a major problem for it. The newly-formed People's Party (안철수의 국민의당) may take many of their seats.

Given the split opposition, a big net gain by the governing, right-wing Saenuri Party (새누리당) still seems possible. Saenuri has apparently set "200 seats" as their election goal (of 300 total seats to fill), up from the current 150. The opposition to the Saenuri Party seems politically discouraged. Both parties have been marred by pathetic infighting.

Here is a frontpage headline story in the Metro newspaper, translated by me. (Thanks to K. from my Korean class for the newspaper.) It was not so hard to translate, but I am unsure what, if anything, is to be "read between the lines":

With One Day to the Election, Entertainers Urge: "Join Us and Vote"

[Photograph]
[Caption:] With the 20th National Assembly Election only a day away, entertainers, too, are doing their part to get out the vote. On Friday, April 8th, AOA girl group member Seolhyeon exercised her right to vote through the early voting system.

"I ask everyone to please exercise your precious right to vote."

With the 20th National Assembly elections approaching in just a day, entertainers, too, are attracting attention in their efforts to get out the vote.

A number of entertainers took time out of their busy schedules to exercise their right to vote through early voting, and recommended that citizens participate in the election.

Among the entertainers participating in the PR campaign to get out the vote for this year's election is Seolhyeon, a member of the girl group AOA. On the afternoon of Friday the 8th, she cast her vote at a community center in Cheongdam, Gangnam District, Seoul.

Seolhyeon is voting for the second time. She voted for the first time in the June 2014 local elections. On Friday, Seolhyeon said, "Every time I vote, I'm filled with feelings of excitement and nervousness. I hope that the person I voted for wins," and "I voted with a sense of excitement in my heart." [End translation]

Original Korean:
[사진] 제20대 국회의원 선거를 하루 앞두고 연예인들도 대거 투표 독려에 나서고 있다. 지난 8일 사전 투표를 통해 선거권을 행사한 걸그룹 AOA 멤버설현. /연합뉴스 총선 D-1, 연예인 투표 독려"소중한 안 표 함께 해요" "여러분의 소중한 한 표 꼭 행사하가시길 바랍니다." 제20대 국회의원 선거가 하루 앞으로 다간온 가운데 연예인들도 대거 투표 독려에 나서 눈길을 끌고 있다. 일부 연예인들은 바쁜 스케줄 속에서 사전 투표로 먼저 소중한 한 표를 행사하며 시민들의 선거 참여를 권했다. 올해 총선 홍보대사로 활동 중인 걸그룹 AOA 맴버 실현은 지난 8일 오후 서울 강남구 청담동 주민센터에서 투표를 했다. 설현은 2014년 6월 제6회 전국동사지방선거 이후 두 번째로 투표에 참여했다. 설현은 이날 "투표할 때마다 설레기도 하고 긴장되기도 한다. 내가 뽑은 서람이 당선될까 기대도 된다"며 "설레는 마음으로 투표했다"고 말했다.

This was in Metro, a free newspaper distributed at subway stations in Seoul (claimed daily readership, 226,000). The article continues by mentioning other entertainers who voted early and/or made similar statements to encourage the apathetic to take part in the civic ritual.

Nothing Seolhyeon said can be read as an endorsement of one party or another. If she has been Gangnam-ized yet, though, she most likely voted for Saenuri. (Her voting precinct is one of the wealthiest in the entire country.)

Why are K-Pop stars, including 21-year-old Seolhyeon, being used as props to promote voting?

Self-Promotion Angle
"Seolhyeon is patriotic; she votes; she cares; she is a good citizen. She also donates money to orphans, holds the door for the elderly, covers her nose when she sneezes, and says her pleases and thank yous, we'll have you know!" (Sincerely, The Management).

Pro-Opposition Angle
Seolhyeon's fans are not likely to be Saenuri supporters. Saenuri has low support among those born in the 1980s and 1990s. If she gets thousands more fans to vote and they go many-to-one against Saenuri, that could swing some elections against Saenuri.

Pro-Government Angle
The government has put up "Make Sure You Vote" banners everywhere. Why would the government do this if higher turnout may mean more votes for the opposition?

Voter turnout for National Assembly elections was:
2012: 54%
2008: 46%
2004: 60%
2000: 57%
1996: 64%
1992: 72%
1988: 76%

There is a clear downward trend, here. There may be a fear that low and declining voter turnout could undermine the state's legitimacy itself. The "Make Sure You Vote" campaign could be a way to reassert the state's legitimacy.

My "Connection" to Seolhyeon
I admit that I'd never heard the name Seolhyeon (설현) before seeing this article. I have seen her, it seems, in advertisements but I didn't recognize it to be the same person as in the newspaper photograph above. Seolhyeon is the spokesmodel for the SK Telecom phone company, my classmate in my current Korean class, M.P., tells me.

I also see from Wikipedia that she was born in Bucheon, next to Seoul, and is a graduate of Gyeonggi Art High School (경기예술고등학교). In fact, I lived in Bucheon from 2011-203, and, in fact, I worked just two minutes' walk from that high school (in a dense urban part of Bucheon New City's Central District [부천신도시 중동]). Seolhyeon graduated in February 2014, which means she was a student at that school from March 2011 (in accordance with the Korean and Japanese school-year system). I began working in Bucheon in September 2011. I likely passed her on the street many times.

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Post-344: One Week to the Election; Closer Look at a "Political Noise Truck" [Korea Election 2016]

4/5/2016

I write this on Tuesday evening, April 5, Korea time. Regular voting begins in this country's national elections one week from tomorrow morning.

This year, direct elections will be held in 253 constituencies, with a further 47 members allocated proportionally based on party vote totals, for a total of 300 seats.

The current National Assembly has only 292 seats filled (Korean Wiki), presumably because of the expulsion and jailing, in 2014, under charges of treason, of several far-left National Assembly members. The Korea Herald, the right-leaning English newspaper, suggested Monday, disapprovingly, that some of the remnants of this far-left party, allegedly pro-North-Korea, have regrouped and are running again in 2016.

Here is the election outlook, according to the Korea Herald, reporting on recent polls:

Likely to Win ("safe seats")
82 seats: Saenuri Party [새누리당] (right-wing, currently governing with a slim majority and the presidency)
35 seats: Democratic Party [더불어민주당] (left-wing, heirs to the Sunshine Policy but trying hard to "rebrand")
20 seats: People's Party [국민의당] recently formed by Ahn Cheol-Soo [안철수] (called "centrist;" populist) (See post-342)
6 seats: Others and Independents
110: Too Close to Call
253: Total Seats to be Elected Directly (plus 47 proportional = 300).

Here is one of the trucks I referred to in post-343, "Waving Back at the Political Noise Trucks." (This was not the truck I "waved back" at.)

"On April the 13th, Your Vote Can Change Songpa!"

Songpa District, Seoul

Some of these political noise trucks are mobile and some are stationary. This one, being stationary, allowed me to get good shots of it, front and back.

This was in Seoul's Songpa District (in red), directly east of Gangnam District.

I originally thought that the man standing in the truck bed was the candidate himself, Park Sung-Soo (박성수), a.k.a. "Number 2," of the Democratic Party. Candidates very often appear personally on their campaign trucks. I am not so sure anymore. The giant picture of him shows him with glasses...

Candidate Park calls himself "The Fool of Songpa" (송파바보 박성수입니다) on his placard, which seems odd. I don't know what to make of that.

The Fool of Songpa, though, seems likely to lose. I learn from Korean Wiki that Songpa District (송파구) of Seoul, a rather wealthy area, is a stronghold of the conservative Saenuri Party. All three of Songpa District's current National Assemblymen are Saenuri members. Gangnam District itself is just as solidly Saenuri.

The Democratic machine was clearly weaker in the area. Behold, above, the two-man street-corner operation during prime Saturday politicking hours. The "red team" (Saenuri Party) had a much slicker operation in the neighborhood (See again post-343, at the end, for a further brief account of each side's politicking tactics as I experienced them in my own small way.)

In Jongno District today, Tuesday, I saw a few more of these sorts of trucks. The one I got the best look at had three people in blue standing in the back, holding a kind of railing, as a driver sped by and one of those in the back jabbered something indecipherable to me, her voice amplified over traffic...

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Post-343: Waving Back at the Political Noise Trucks [Korea Election 2016]

4/3/2016