|
Following a discussion in the PYF historical fun fact thread, we thought there might be space between a "PYF funny pictures" and a "PYF mildly interesting pictures" thread for a thread dedicated to cool old photos and pictures, depicting both well-known and obscure stuff from yesteryear (they still are allowed to be funny and/or mildly interesting, though!). A Bosnian girl waits for a funeral service to commence (Sarajevo, 1992)  Carriages amass in front of St Peter's cathedral for a public papal audience (Rome, 1860)  English-German flyer calling for Chicago-based workers to arm themselves and gather at a rally which would later escalate into a shootout known as the "Haymarket massacre" (Chicago, 1887)  Archbishop José Maria Yerovi of Quito, Ecuador, two years after his death. Pope Pius IX appointed him archbishop before the news of Yerovi's death had reached Rome, so the pope ordered him to be dug up and properly invested with the pallium, i.e. the sign of being an archbishop (Quito, 1869)  The stern-looking woman to the very left maybe is none other than Constanze Mozart (1762-1842), wife of legendary composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who had died in 1791 (Altötting, 1840?)  Winston Churchill, his son and his grandson all dressed up for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (London, 1953 (colourised))  A guy getting pantsed (Luttrell Psalter, c.1320-1340, England) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPzyJxwcWpE What are videos, if not a lot of photos quickly shown consecutively?  Funeral procession of Austrian-Hungarian emperor Francis Joseph who had ruled his realm for 68 long years (Vienna, 1916)There is an absolute wealth of easily available historical photos and pictures nowadays. Some starters: the "History Porn" and the "History in Color" subreddits, the LIFE photo archive and the Europeana collections. But again, there is a fuckton of other databases and collections, so delve into the wonderful world of historical iconography and photography and show us your best finds!
|
#
¿
Sep 1, 2018 13:03
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 21:17 |
|
|
Alhazred posted:
 And here he is sitting in his zebra-drawn carriage  Speaking of animals:  This is the "Lion of Gripsholm" in Sweden. Doesn't look so bad, no? In 1731, King Frederick I got a lion as a gift from the Bey of Algiers, and when the animal died he gave its remains to a taxidermist so that it would continue to adorn his royal halls. The problem (at least as the story goes) was: the taxidermist hadn't been able to see the animal while alive, so he did the best he could and recreated it as a heraldic lion - and he did a good job! If you make the mistake and look at the animal from any other angle, however...  ...well, it doesn't look so grand anymore! Government Handjob posted:It is worth mentioning that the Haymarket Massacre ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair ) is why we have the International Worker's Day (May 1st). Very cool! Going southwards (and paging Krankenstyle to this thread), this appears to be the earliest photograph made in Denmark, showing Ulfeldts Plads in Copenhagen, probably around June 1840:  There is even a person visible! If you look closely, there is a guy sleeping at the foot of the statue which is why the long exposure didn't fail to catch him.  It's surprisingly hard to find any one photo that's considered to be "the oldest" in Germany (and the possible photograph of Constanze Mozart from 1840 isn't exactly commonly accepted as such), so maybe this will suffice: Hermann Biow (1804?-1850) was one of the earlist daguerrotypists in Germany and took a couple of photos of Hamburg after the big fire of 1842. They belong to the oldest examples of journalistic photography ever. And as a last picture:  I took this out of a book with my phone camera, so excuse the mediocre quality. This is Franz Götzfried (1822-1915), the last messenger employed by the Catholic dean of Kirchheim, southwest of Augsburg. I can only dream of ever being half as cool as this guy 
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2018 00:11
|
|
|
Ommin posted:I'm having some difficulties pulling images from this site, so I will just link it. I recently rediscovered this curated archive from The New York Times. It has some gems. That's really cool! I'ts possible to pull the pictures by using Firefox, at least; I right-click them, choose "show picture information" and then choose again the .jpg depicting the front side. It's a bit cumbersome, but it works perfectly!   quote:Sept. 1, 1915: “Germans lately do not capture a number of Frenchmen but they succeeded to capture five warlike French dogs,” read a curiously light caption accompanying this photo, taken while a world war was raging. “The dogs however, do not feel very cross with their captors.” Photo: The New York Times I've also just noticed that Associated Press has started putting videos from their vast film archive on youtube, with lots of fascinating stuff in there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUegeOYm2wU Installation of Pope John Paul I, exactly 40 years ago. He would die a sudden and unexpected (and amny would say: suspicious) death only 25 days later https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njFAoTYi7XE Super male-gazey British newsreel from 1974 about women's football in Germany.  for two lady streakers appearing for a couple of seconds, I guess
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2018 15:35
|
|
|
Short and to the point, I see I posted some imo really fascinating photos of a Peruvian village in the 1960s along with the corresponding backstory in the old Christianity thread over in A/T some time ago, might as well repost it here now that the original thread is closed: By chance I stumbled upon a digital collection of gorgeous photos today that depict a bygone time of a very foreign (to Western eyes, that is) variety of syncretised Catholicism, but also gives fascinating insights into how the Catholic Church succeeded and failed in the specific context of 20th century Peru. Chuschi is a small village of maybe 1,300 people deep in the Peruvian Andes at an elevation of about 11,000 feet, situated right in the middle of the province of Cangallo where even nowadays the vast majority of people speak a Quechua dialect instead of Spanish. Back in the late 60s, an American anthropologist called Billie Jean Isbell spent a long time in the village community and observed both its daily life and its varied rituals, taking lots of photos in the progress. Here are some of the 1967 Corpus Christi celebration:   There was a procession, of course, where figures of various saints were paraded through the village as part of elaborate floats which were built by the mayordomos, i.e. local elites who also organised the entire fiesta. The procession wasn't the most important part of the ritual, at least not for the villagers. What really was at the centre for them was the invasion of the sallqaruna, the "savage people". The sallqaruna were llama herders who lived permanently in the puna grasslands of the high Central Andes, even higher than the village itself. They were neither regarded as a different caste nor a different ethnicity by the villagers, but due to their geographical isolation they were regarded with suspicion at best and open hostility at worst, and many people in the village believed them to be were-llamas, a shameful condition created by unbecoming sexual conduct.   The central part of the ceremony was the ritual invasion of Chuschi by villagers diguised as sallqaruna. In the upper image you see a little boy playing the part of a sallqaruna, riding on horseback into the village; the other picture shows the ritual descent from the puna of the whole group.  Part of the play was the sounding of the alarm, when villagers blew their waqarapuku. There are no more (good) photos of the ceremony, but after the arrival of the sallqaruna it also involved the "savage men" ritually despoiling a statue of the Blessed Virgin, their being "chased off" and a bullfight. There is also another wonderful photo of a funeral ceremony I wanted to show you:  The important thing here is that this is not a priest, but a "simple" villager conducting the funeral rites, albeit one who had been identified by the community as a religious specialist. In this shot you can see him carrying a cross and sprinkling the funeral bier with holy water; Isabell tells us that he was reciting "Latin" prayers during that time, or at least prayers in a language that was supposed to approximate actual Latin (the square quotes were used by Isabell herself). Why now a layman and not an ordained priest? Well, this has a twofold story behind it: on the one hand, this probably represents a surviving remnant of pre-Columbian funeral rites in which the priest isn't actually supposed to play a part. On the other hand, Chuschi was and is situated in the Archdioce of Ayacucho which used to be regarded as the most Catholic part of Peru, but also the diocese with the most conservative clergy. While other dioceses in Peru picked up liberation theology and its predecessors at an early date and put a lot of effort into caring for the poor and downtrodden, especially in rural regions like the Andes, the clergy of Ayacucho continued to display an almost colonial mindset, where priests mostly came from Spanish or at least mestizo background and represented the social, ethnic and economic elite with little regard for the worries of their flock. In the specific case of Chuschi, at the time the photo was taken the parish was administered by Father Chávez, a priest who originally hailed from the coastal Áncash region and came to the village in 1963. Like his predecessors, Father Chávez enjoyed the benefits of his office in the form of 100 acres of the best land and a large herd of 800 livestock cared for free of charge by the villagers. Even though by the standards of the time and region this made him a very wealthy man, he also charged the villagers for basically everything: Baptising children? Money, please. Performing a wedding? You better believe that'll cost you. He read up to three Masses a day, each one lasting a whopping five to eight minutes (!) and charged the villagers through the nose for each one of them. Even the accessories you can see in the photo above - the cross, the aspergillum, the bier and even the black cloth - had to be rented from the priest for a fee. No wonder that the villagers wanted to minimise Father Chávez' involvement! Small wonder too, that in a region where a priest conducting himself like this was sadly not the exception but the rule, a great deal of resentment quickly grew. It is no coincidence that it was Chuschi where in 1980 the maoist insurgency known as the "Shining Path" began its decades-long bloody war with the state that left tens of thousands dead, and that it was the region of Ayacucho where the fighting was the heaviest. While in other parts of Peru, the clergy would denounce all violence on both sides, both by the Shining Path and the military government (sometimes at great personal danger), the Ayacuchan clergy would instead throw its weight fully behind the local government even though everybody knew that its death squads were at least as violent and brutal against the peasants as the Shining Path insurgents were (Chuschi itself suffered from that, when in 1991 government militias beat up and arrested four villagers charged with harbouring maoist sympathies. None of them were ever seen again). Father Chávez wasn't part of that, however. After a while the conflict between him and his flock had grown so bad (not only because of financial arguments, but also because of allegations of general bad conduct levied against him, ranging from public drunkenness to physical violence against his subordinates and even rape), that in 1971 the village petitioned the archbishop for Father Chávez' immediate removal. After the archbishop refused that request, the villagers instead occupied all ecclesiastical grounds and buildings, took over the priest's livestock and unceremoniously forced him to leave the village. No successor priest was able to establish himself, and to this day Chuschi doesn't have a resident priest, relying instead on itinerant priests to perform various rites and doing the rest by themselves. It isn't unique in this regard, however: many other parishes within the Archdiocese of Ayacucho also lost their priests, both due to a lack in vocations and after similar altercations as in Chuschi, and either turned towards evangelical Pentecostalism or created their own, independent version of folk Catholicism that largely has no need for Church hierarchy anymore. If the archdiocese wanted to address that or maybe even stop that development, then it needed to honestly confront its own shady past. There is no sign that it wants to do that, however; instead the former archbishop of Ayacucho and apologist for governmental violence got made cardinal-archbishop of Lima and refuses to even talk about the Shining Path years. Literature:
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2018 14:02
|
|
|
buglord posted:Great thread! My old one died in its infancy. https://rarehistoricalphotos.com has a lot of good stuff too, along with some interesting (albeit short) write-ups accompanying the pictures. quote:To comply with [the papal] disposition, on March 5, 1869, almost two years after his death, José Ignacio Checa y Barba proceeded to exhume the body of Yerovi, who with great pomp was placed in the Cathedral, seated in an armchair, invested with vestments and pontifical insignia. Miraculously and to the delight of the Catholic Church and all the faithful, the corpse still maintained its flexibility and there was no sign of decomposition in it. It was a different time, simply put. Death was no stranger, and if I had to venture a guess I would say that most people would have seen plenty of dead bodies in their lives. Add to this a certain Catholic fascination with death as well as a lack of decomposition being regarded as a surefire sign of holiness, and it becomes clear that there was nothing morbid about that for people, but it was instead a sign of Christian triumph over death as well as a symbol that Yerovi would continue to exercise his episcopal office after death by way of intercession (which, going by Catholic theology, means that the dead shall ask God to favour the living). I found something interesting on Twitter today:  That's a weird mound in the middle of Mexico, photographed sometime during the late 19th century. What could have caused this curious geological formation?  This is what was beneath: the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, a 1,900 years old structure erected by the Teotihuacan people which was given its current name by the Aztecs centuries later. It is the third-largest pyramid in the world. I wonder if the local peasants had any idea about what might be hidden under the earth?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 5, 2018 18:00
|
|
|
buglord posted:Are paintings kosher in this thread? Was going to make a post about John Rabe because that guy's story is wild.  Who are those guys they're guarding, do you know? To celebrate reaching the second page, I set myself a challenge: Look up five random digital collections I didn't know before and post one thing out of them. Go! 1. The Harry Ransom Center Digital Collections The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin is a huge collection specialising in the arts and humanities, although the only way to actually download its pictures seems to be a screengrab, sadly. It contains amongst others many photographs taken from the Black Crook cast, a Broadway play of the 1860s that is widely seen as the prototype to the modern musical. The daring dresses of its dancers as well as the fact that it was the first live performance of the can-can dance in the US made it the subject of heated debate at its time.  Pauline Markham (1847-1919) was an English actress who got cast as the fairy queen Stalacta for the 1870 revival of "The Black Crook". It was her breakthrough role and one for which she would be remembered decades later. 2. The Victoria and Albert Museum I know about this world-famous museum specialising in decorative arts and design, of course - as a matter of fact, I even visited it once many years ago! I didn't know however that they also offer a huge digital collection with over 750,000 pictures available, amongst them this WW2 poster that was part of the Ministry of Home Security's "Careless Talk" campaign:  3. Éischte Weltkrich The University of Luxembourg just put up this cool digital exhibition about WW1 in Luxembourg. Sadly, its images can only be screengrabbed again.  German soldiers parading through the town of Echternach in Luxembourg, right at the German border (1914) 4.The Photographical Archive of the Swiss Ethnological Society Oh yeah, that's the really good stuff (for me, a cultural historian, that is ). This archive offers more than 95,000 photographs documenting Swiss folklore, religious practice and everyday life during the 19th and 20th centuries. In the photo below we see one of Switzerland's last wainwrights at work in 1963. 5. Archive of Malian Photography This is a cool and laudable effort undertaken by Malian photographers and archivists with US support to digitise the collections of five of Mali's most important photographers of the 20th century. As of now, their collection houses more than 100,000 photos covering the 1940s (when Mali was still a French colony) to the 1990s.  At a dance party at the Grand Hotel of Bamako, a couple is dancing face-to-face in front of guests sitting around tables (1961) System Metternich has a new favorite as of 20:58 on Sep 6, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Sep 6, 2018 20:50
|
|
|
SavageGentleman posted:
This is insanely cool, thank you! One small correction, though: it's "Pfinztag" (=Donnerstag/Thursday) and not "Pfingsttag" in the first line after "Mittwoch"
|
|
#
¿
Sep 6, 2018 21:52
|
|
|
Shai-Hulud posted:Did you know street view existed in NYC in the 80s? Well not really but to figure out who needs to pay what kind of property taxes they had to figure out which lots were vacant and what kind of buildings were built on the occupied ones. So they just drove around and photographed every building in NYC. That's really interesting! It reminds me of the pictures of Bruce Davidson, who in the 1980s travelled the NYC subway with his camera and produced some imo really captivating pictures:     (An undercover cop arresting a mugger  )
|
|
#
¿
Sep 9, 2018 21:36
|
|
|
Let's do Part 1: From the Kingdom of Prussia to the Republic of Germany The earliest (known) photos of Berlin were taken surprisingly late, in about 1853 or 1854, a good 14-15 years after Germany's first photos were taken in Munich. They are also not very interesting. How about this photo of Spittelmarkt square instead, which was taken in 1868? Back then, there was no unified Germany yet, and the Kingdom of Prussia was governed by King Wilhelm I and his chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The memory of the war fought between Prussia and the other German states two years ago was still fresh in everybody's mind, and I guess that nobody really thought it possible that Berlin would become the capital of a newly created German Empire only three years later.  Below you can see the same location, almost two decades later. Berlin was still governed by the same two men who together had formed an entire generation of Berliners and Prussians, although, unbeknownst to both of them, their era was quickly coming to its end. Berlin had grown rapidly during these years, almost doubling its population. Many old buildings had vanished and were replaced with new ones. If you look at the two images you'll notice that the church in the former one can't be seen. Indeed it was torn down in 1881to make place for the ever-increasing traffic. In 1887 it still consisted mainly of horse-drawn carriages and the occasional electrical tramway, but very soon afterwards the first cars would begin driving through the streets of the German capital. The emperor, who was old enough to personally remember when Napoleon had occupied Berlin more than eighty years before, was known for his nostalgia towards the older and (at least on the surface) simpler days of yore.  There was no going back, of course. In 1888, Wilhelm I died and was (after the quick death of his son Friedrich III , a passionate smoker, who only reigned for a few days before succumbing to cancer of the throat) eventually succeeded by his grandson Wilhelm II. The new emperor felt no affinity towards the old Prussia, that had ceased to exist when he was only a young boy. He was instead a passionate supporter of technological progress, and under his reign Berlin underwent even more changes. One part of this rapid change were the first coloured photos of Berlin, taken in 1903:  The not-yet-completed new cathedral...  ...the medieval Krögel neighbourhood (one of the oldest parts of the city), which was completely torn down in 1935...  ...small restaurants in the quieter parts of the city...  ...and finally the vibrant night life. The fast-paced modernisation saw a lot of people on the losing side too, of course. Like in many other cities all over the world, rapid growth and quick industrialisation had created a massive underclass whose members often lived in appalling poverty.  This 1905 photo shows a couple in its one-room basement flat...  ...while eleven people altogether lived in this run-down flat that consisted of one room and a small kitchen with nothing else. In 1914, World War I broke out. Like in many other cities, towns and villages all over Europe, people were exuberant. Nationalist fervour had gripped all but a few minds, and after many decades of peace, not a few people were eagerly awaiting the next war. While many people nowadays tend to think of pre-1914 Europe as socially stable, where people "knew their place" and wizened monarchs were gracefully waving from their balconies, it was anything but. The rampant modernisation, the extreme changes in social structure and hierarchy and many other things led to many contemporaries thinking of their own time in negative terms: "spoiled and decadent", "devoid of meaning and devoid of God" or "technological dystopia leading to certain doom" were common descriptors by intellectuals critical of their time. Shortly after the war, German author Ernst Jünger published his war memoirs under the title "Storms of Steel". This wasn't random, but instead picked up on a common pre-war sentiment: The air had been growing hot, humid and heavy, and it needed a proper thunderstorm (i.e. war) to make breathing easier again.  On July 31, 1914, military officials announce to the people of Berlin that Germany had entered a "status of imminent danger of war! and also proclaimed an ultimatum by the German government towards the Russian czar. If Czar Nicholas II wouldn't recall his troops within 12 hours, there would be war.  The next day: Thousands of people wait in front of the Berlin palace to hear whether Russia had accepted the terms of the ultimatum or not. It hadn't...  ...and upon the news that there would be a war, people were cheering in the streets. In Berlin they were carrying around portraits of the two emperors, Wilhelm II of Germany and Franz-Josef of Austria.  Entire school classes were marching off to the recruiters, and during the early days of the war, scenes like this where cavalry soldiers are departing from Berlin under the cheers of the people were common.  I also like this photo which shows people eagerly gathering around the newest issue of the local paper, bringing news of the war effort during its earliest days.  During the beginning of the war, lists with the names of fallen soldiers were put up on the streets, like Prussia had done during previous wars. When after a couple of weeks those lists grew and grew into ever larger sizes, the government eventually banned them. While the war raged on in both the east and the west, life in Berlin initially went on as normal. When the war didn't end by late 1914, as the government had promised, it soon became apparent that the German government was ill prepared for a long war. The Allied blockade of German ports as well as the fact that German agriculture tended to be extremely small-dimensioned (i.e. small, family-owned holdings that were worked on in pretty much the same way and with many of the same tools that had already been in use during the late Middle Ages) in contrast to the large stretches of land in e.g. Great Britain or the US, where machines made sowing and harvesting much easier and more efficient. A famous German historian once remarked that on a strictly nutritional level the war had been lost already by 1916.  Goulash being handed out to the hungry masses in Berlin, 1916. During the winter of 1916/17, official rations for adults were limited to 270 grams of bread, 35 grams of meat (including the bones), 25 grams of sugar and a quarter of an egg. Thousands starved.  On November 9, 1918, many of Germany's political elites had come to the conclusion that the imminent defeat also had to mean the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Chancellor Max von Baden, who wanted to somehow preserve monarchy altogether, proclaimed the Kaiser's abdication before Wilhelm knew anything about it; he fled to the Netherlands afterwards. The social democrat politician Philipp Scheidemann was notified that the communist party was preparing a big statement at the Berlin palace, the same place where four years before Kaiser Wilhelm had officially proclaimed the beginning of the war. Scheidemann, who wanted to prevent a communist takeover of Berlin or even Germany, decided that the only way to do so was to issue a proclamation of his own. Around noon he appeared on one of the Reichstag's (i.e. the parliament's) many balconies and publicly proclaimed the new German republic. The masses broke out in cheers, and when communist politician Karl Liebknecht proclaimed a communist Germany two hours later, he had already lost the people's support before he even began. The war would end two days later. There were probably many people in Berlin during these days who thought that the end of the war would finally bring some peace and quiet back to their city. They were sorely mistaken, of course.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2018 19:40
|
|
|
 https://twitter.com/sovietvisuals/status/1041992243731746816?s=21
|
|
#
¿
Sep 18, 2018 17:14
|
|
|
 "Photograph of Anandibai Joshee (left) from India, Kei Okami (center) from Japan, and Tabat M. Islambooly (right) from Ottoman Syria, students from the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania. All three were the first woman from their respective countries to obtain a degree in Western medicine." (10 October 1885)
|
|
#
¿
Sep 19, 2018 22:44
|
|
|
German war propaganda, 1914. The top line reads "Are we the barbarians?" and then come a number of comparisons with England and France. From top to bottom: Annual social insurance payments - number of illiterates per 10,000 recruits - expenses for education - number of published books - nobel prizes - patents (I didn't fact-check it, but I think it's certainly an interesting variety of wartime propaganda I hadn't seen before)
|
|
#
¿
Sep 26, 2018 08:09
|
|
|
duckmaster posted:I could probably name six pre-1914 Nobel French or British Nobel laureates so that has to be bullshit. I looked it up, there were six British Nobel laureates before 1914. It is possible to arrive at the German propaganda numbers though when you get a bit creative:
Just decide that those three don't meet your criteria for English laureates and you're set! I imagine that it's similar for the French numbers, though I guess it is even harder to arrive at three there - France had 16 laureates before WW1, after all. Interestingly enough they're also selling themselves a bit short - I'm counting 17 German laureates before 1914, but they only mention 14.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 26, 2018 16:16
|
|
|
Angry Salami posted:I wonder if they're counting colonial recruits in the English and French numbers; I imagine literary would be lower in India and Africa compared to the metropole, at least in English and French. I have no idea if the Germans even bothered recruiting from their handful of colonies, either way it wouldn't have a big impact on their own statistics. That must be it, yeah. The German colonial troops were only ever involved in the African theatre and played no role whatsoever at the European fronts, whereas e.g. ~130,000 Indians fought in Belgium and France over the course of the war. Regarding the data on literacy I was able to quickly find:
|
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2018 12:23
|
|
|
The Internet Archive just put up the digitised collection of the Afghan Media Resource Center, a team of media trainers trying to teach Afghans media production and journalism during a time where the Soviet-backed socialist government was putting a lot of pressure on foreign journalists covering the Soviet-Afghan war. It consists of 76,000 photographs, 1,175 hours of video material, 356 hours of audio material, and many stories from print media, covering the years from 1987 to 1994. Lots of good stuff in there! Two Mujahideen sitting on ammo boxes somewhere in Khost Province near the Pakistani border, April 1991 https://archive.org/details/amrc_b63_b_198804 Footage of a mujahideen wrestling tournament in the Pakistani border province of Peshawar, April 1988
|
|
#
¿
Sep 30, 2018 19:51
|
|
|
Arise, thread! This comes two days late, but here are some pictures illustrating why November 9th is also sometimes calles the "fateful day" of Germany: The execution of Robert Blum by Carl Steffeck, 1848/49 The impressive neckbeard of the gentleman in the middle belongs to Robert Blum (1807-1848), an author from Cologne who grew up in a poor family, worked himself up to an important administrative position within the theatre in Leipzig and from the 1830s on became increasingly politically active as a representative of the national-liberal and republican movement in Germany which demanded national unity (there was no real "Germany" back then, but instead a rather loose "German Federation" with 41 fully autonomous member states whose rulers had no intention whatsoever of handing off power to a centralised German government) as well as the abolition of all German monarchies in favour of democratic republics. When the 1848 revolution led to the formation of a German parliament in Frankfurt, Blum was elected one of Saxony's representatives and soon became one of the leading politicians of the revolution. In October 1848, the revolution escalated in Vienna where revolutionaries took control of the city and forced Emperor Ferdinand and his government to flee. Blum travelled there to support the revolutionaries and was taken prisoner when the Austrian army stormed the city on November 1st. Even though Blum was a citizen of Saxony and a member of parliament, i.e. subject to parliamentary immunity, he was nevertheless sentenced to death and then executed by the Austrians on November 9th, 1848. This signalled to all Germany not only that the German elites would rather commit murder than collaborate with the (generally speaking pretty moderate) Frankfurt parliament and spelled the eventual failure of the revolution the following year, but also was the first step of Austria slowly distancing itself from the German Federation and concentrating more on its vast non-federal territories which were populated by millions of non-German speakers. For the next important event on this day I'll just quote myself: quote:
In many ways, the German republic proclaimed in 1918 was what Robert Blum had fought and died for seventy years earlier, but of course it had come at a terrible price and would soon lead into something even worse.  Five years later, on November 9th, 1923, another revolution was attempted in Germany, but from the other side of politics instead. The early success of socialist and communist revolutionaries in Bavaria after 1918, culminating in the short-lived Soviet Bavarian Republic, was in important factor in the strong radicalisation process undergone by Bavarian right-wingers. By the early 20s, the various right-wing movements, ranging from "merely" conservatives via anti-democratic monarchists, Catholic ultrareactionaries and völkisch fascists, were maybe more radical than anywhere else in Germany. In late October 1923, the conciliatory attitude of the German government towards France during the French occupation of the Ruhr area led the conservative government of Bavaria to proclaim a break with the federal government and to install a dictatorship with the ultimate goal of toppling president Ebert and his chancellor Stresemann. The new Bavarian dictator Gustav von Kahr wasn't the only one with ambitions towards Berlin, though: The head of a relatively small fascist party that had its basis in Munich was also dreaming of a "march towards Berlin", inspired by Mussolini's successful march on and occupation of Rome the year before. I'm talking, of course, of Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP. On November 8th, the combined forces of Hitler's NSDAP and the supporters of Prussian war hero and veteran of at least one coup attempt before Erich Ludendorff stormed the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall in Munich, where von Kahr was delivering a speech, and took him and nearly the entire Bavarian cabinet captive. Kahr was forced at gunpoint to declare his support of Hitler, and in the following morning of November 9th, Nazi stormtroopers swept the city arresting political opponents like the nine socialist city councillors pictured above. During noon, a large number of people led by Hitler and Ludendorff marched towards Odeon square in Munich, where the local military headquarters lay. Hitler believed that the mutual hatred of the Berlin government as well as Kahr declaring his support would be enough to get the police and the military on his side, but shortly before they were able to reach the HQ buildings, policemen and soldiers blocked the road and opened fire. In the following shootout four police officers, 15 rebels and a waiter who had stepped out of his café to see what all the ruckus was about were killed. Hitler managed to flee Munich, but was arrested two days later. The NSDAP was banned in all of Germany, and Hitler was sentenced to prison. It was a laughably short sentence, of course. Hitler left jail after only nine months, and the ban of the NSDAP was recalled soon enough, too. The Nazis constructed an entiry mythos about their failed attempt at a coup, and their 15 dead were honoured every year in ostentatious ceremonies. https://twitter.com/ElishevaAvital/status/1060914913328148480 Here, I'm opening with a Twitter thread, because there are lots of amazing pictures inside that have never been seen before! 15 years after their failed coup, the Nazis had already been in power for five years, shaping all of Germany after their fascist imagination and terrorising Jews, political opponents and other "enemies of the people" more and more with every passing day. From early 1938 on, Nazi policy had the dispossession of Jews and the "aryanisation" of their belongings as its goal, in order to both force Jews out of the country and to finance Hitler's war preparations. At least by late October it had been the fixed plan of the government to incite riots against the Jewish minority sometime during November - Berthold Löwenstein from Leipzig got told by one of his former judge colleagues that he was to leave Germany before November 5th, because the talk in the economy ministry was that a "big action" against the Jews was planned for after that. The Nazis got also lucky in their careful orchestrating of the coming pogroms as a spontaneous expression of popular emotion when on November 7th, a young Polish Jew living in Paris named Herschel Grynszpan had been told that his entire German side of the family had been forced to leave the country. Grynszpan took a pistol, walked up to the German embassy and put a bullet in the head of one of the members of the ambassadorial staff. The planned pogrom had already started even before news of the assassination had reached Germany, but the Nazi government skillfully used it as an additional pretense to conduct the raids, murders and pogroms and even widen them in their scope. The peak of the pogroms was reached during the night between November 9th and November 10th. Up to 1,500 people might have been murdered, hundreds of synagogues and thousands of Jewish-owned shops were looted and burned down and up to 30,000 mostly wealthy Jews were arrested and forced to give up all of their belongings, before they were finally removed from the country. The devastation was immense and the regime's murderous intent plain for all to see, and from the burning of synagogues in 1938 it was only a short way to the burning of bodies three years later.   For the next entry I decided to describe two events at once, even though they were seven years apart. In the first picture you can see university students in Hamburg carrying a banner in front of professors in traditional academic gowns during the celebrations for the inauguration of the university's new rector on November 9th, 1967. The text (which would later on become emblematic for an entire generation of students) reads "Under the gowns - the stink of 1,000 years". The "1,000 years" refer to the Third Reich about which Hitler had famously said that it would last a thousand years, and by means of that allusion the students wanted to draw attention that the university, and by extension most of the West German establishment, was still populated in its leadership positions by people who would rather not talk about what they had been doing from 1933-1945. The black cloth of the banner had originally been part of the funeral of Benno Ohnesorg, the young student who only shortly before had been shot dead (today we know what the students back then could only suspect: that Ohnesorg's death hadn't been an accident, but an outright execution) and whose death served as a rallying cry for an entire generation of fed-up young leftist students all over Germany. The "1968 revolution", which really had begun the year before, soon saw the radicalisation of various hardline splinter movements who weren't content with just breaking up the ossified structures of post-war Germany and exposing the Nazi past of its elites, but wanted to destroy the capitalist system altogether, by violence if necessary. Ohnesorg's death was seen as a clear sign by many that the state was fully prepared to murder its opponents, and a number of left-wing terrorist and paramilitary organisations formed as a response, the largest and best-known of them being the "Red Army Faction" (RAF). One of the RAF's founding members was Holger Meins (1941-1974), a young artist from Hamburg who went on to participate in the 1972 "May Offensive" of the RAF which killed four people and injured 74. Shortly afterwards, Meins was arrested after a shootout with the police. The RAF prisoners claimed the status of war prisoners and repeatedly went into hunger strikes in order to enforce preferential treatment and to draw national and international attention to their fight against the system. None of the prisoners was more determined than Holger Meins, though; why other RAF members like Andreas Baader had their lawyers smuggle in food during their self-imposed "hunger strikes", Meins starved himself until his eventual death on November 9th, 1974. At the time of his death, the 6 ft tall Meins only weighed about 86 pounds. His death, skillfully presented by the RAF as a martyrdom at the hands of a hateful state, again served to energise a large number of RAF supporters and drew additional members. The RAF would continue to be enemy of the state No. 1 until 1977, when the airplaned they had abducted and threatened to explode in order to gain the release of the remaining prisoners was successfully stormed by German federal police. It would go on to exist and occasionally kill those it deemed "enemies of the revolution" until it dissolved itself in 1998. It has made a reappearance in the news recentely, however, since at least three former RAF members who haved spent their lives in hiding since the 80s resurfaced again in order to rob a number of banks and money transports. They evaded capture by the police, though, and the memory of the RAF continues to haunt the German public.  Finally, the (only dull on the surface) picture of a press conference given by members of the East German politburo on the evening of November 9th, 1989. The GDR had been in crisis mode for several weeks at this point, with almost every city seeing ever-growing demonstrations against the socialist regime and a rapidly increasing number of people applying for an emigration license. The socialist system was failing, and the politburo was desperately trying to both appease its own enraged people as well as somehow avoid the looming state bankruptcy, which secret cash infusions by the West German government had only managed to postpone. One of the measures designed by the new leadership around Egon Krenz (who had forced his predecessor Erich Honecker to resign only three weeks before) to bring some calm into the situation was to enact a new travelling law which was supposed to make it much easier for GDR citizens to leave the country. The text of the law was repeatedly recalled and altered in the hours before the press conference, and the politburo member Günter Schabowski, who was supposed to answer the journalists' questions, hadn't been a part of the process and only had a small, hand-written text to go off, which Krenz had given to him before. Schabowski didn't know that the law was supposed to be made public during night, when as few people as possible were able to hear about it, and freely admitted to the journalists that such a law was underway. When the journalists asked when it was supposed to take effect, a somewhat overwhelmed Schabowski started to stammer "As far as I know — effective immediately, without delay." Wikipedia posted:Later, when asked whether the new regulations also applied to travel between East and West Berlin, Schabowski looked at the text again and discovered that they did. When Daniel Johnson of The Daily Telegraph asked what that meant for the Berlin Wall, Schabowski sat frozen before giving a rambling statement about the Wall being tied to the larger disarmament question. Instead of stealthily opening up the border with as little attention as possible, as Krenz had originally planned, Schabowski not being fully informed led to East and West German media live broadcast this decisive press conference into thousands of homes. Tens of thousands of people immediately made for the Berlin Wall, which at this point had been the defining symbol of German division and the dictatorship of the SED. The border guards had no idea what was going on, and after Schabowski bumbling through the press conference it was a second stroke of luck that night that none of the soldiers guarding the border was inclined to use violence on the people demanding to cross over into the West. A collective feeling of euphoria gripped both Germanies, and all efforts of the SED regime to maintain its rule somehow were doomed that day. What had been seen as utterly impossible by most even a day before, i.e. the eventual reunification of Germany, was made possible on November 9th, 1989, and became reality not even 11 months later.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2018 20:23
|
|
|
Krazyface posted:I just saw this, and it's perfect for this thread. lmao, this is amazing
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2018 07:44
|
|
|
 Frontispiece of a diptych made by an anonymous 16th century Flemish artist. The caption reads: "Leave this panel closed, otherwise you’ll be angry with me." But let's open it anyway, how bad could it be?   lmao  ("It’s not my fault because I warned you in advance!" - "Moreover, we wanted to warn you so you wouldn’t jump out the window!")
|
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2018 22:04
|
|
|
And how about some Wehrmacht soldiers in drag?       
|
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2018 22:14
|
|
|
This is extremely cool, thank you!
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2019 15:56
|
|
|
Is a picture of a slip of paper with nothing but text on it still proper for this thread? Whatever, here is the oldest printed advertisment of the English language, published in 1476 or 1477, kept at the Bodleian Library in Oxford: quote:If it plese ony man spirituel or temporel to bye ony pyes of two and thre comemoracio[n]s of salisbury use enpryntid after the forme of this prese[n]t lettre whiche ben wel and truly correct, late hym come to westmonester in to the almonesrye at the reed pale and he shal haue them good chepe Translation courtesy of reddit: "If it please any man, whether clerical or lay, to buy any one piece or more of the Ordinals of the Liturgy according to the Use of Sarum, as printed in the same way as this present notice, which is very good and correct, let him come to Westminster, at the Red Bucket public house in the Almonry neighborhood, and he shall have them right cheap. Please keep this sign where it is." Here is an article with a lot more details about the ad and its backstory.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2019 21:39
|
|
|
Here are some photos from the years immediately preceding WW2 as well as taken during its earliest phase, depicting events I didn't really know about : It wasn't just the Germans that invaded Czechoslovakia. There had been other minorities than just the Sudeten Germans living in the CSR: In some parts of the country, Poles and Hungarians formed a majority. After the Third Reich had moved in and annexed the majority German regions, both Poland and Hungary followed as well, taking over those parts of the CSR they deemed theirs.  Hungarian tanks in the Czechoslovakian city of Khust, now in western Ukraine  A Hungarian and a Polish soldier shaking hands at the new common border in what used to be the Czechoslovakian Carpathians  Another encounter of Polish and Hungarian troops  Hungarian ruler Miklós Horthy leading a parade on horseback in the newly occupied city of Košice  Polish tanks entering the city of Český Těšín  The city name displayed at the train station of Český Těšín is switched to the Polish version  Polish troops at the (former) border station in the city of Bohumín  German soldiers observing the Polish occupation of Bohumín  The German military attaché to Poland, Major General Bogislav von Studnitz, shakes hands with the "Marshal of Poland", General Edward Rydz-Śmigły, after the parade held in Warsaw on Polish independence day (November 11th, 1938) So much for the fate of Czechoslovakia. Everybody otoh knows about how the Germans and the Soviets carved up Poland together, but I didn't know that they even held a military parade together in Brest-Litovsk!  A German and a Soviet officer greeting each other in Poland  Generals Mauritz von Wiktorin (left), Heinz Guderian (centre) and Kombrig Semyon Krivoshein (right)  German and Soviet soldiers watching the parade   The parade itself
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2019 23:34
|
|
|
In my hometown in Bavaria there is an old pilgrimage church with the rare dedication of "Our Lord's Rest" that has been drawing pilgrims for more than five centuries now. Since basically forever, pilgrims have been going to sacred site like this church because of very specific concerns: Maybe they are sick and want to pray for divine help, or they have survived sickness or an accident and want to say thanks to what they believe was God bestowing his mercy upon them. During the early modern era and even beyond, many pilgrims would leave little Votivtafeln or "votive tablets" as an offering, which usually depicted the individual pilgrim and the reason why they had made their way to the church of Our Lord's Rest. Those pilgrimages were an integral part especially of Baroque Catholicism and were practiced by virtually everybody, from the very poorest all the way up to crowned heads of state. Just as many people commissioned votive tablets to be made, and because many pilgrims weren't exactly raking in the money, those tablets were usually done either by themselves if they had any artistic talent or by affordable local artists catering to the pilgrims. Votive tablets are an important part of research into the history of everyday life: For the most part they were made by common people for common people without all the trappings and subtext the professional oil paintings had with which the elite liked to depict itself. In my hometown's church hundreds of those tablets still adorn the walls, but they are pretty hard to photograph. So I was really excited when I not only realised that the local university library not only has a book with tons of colour photos of many of those votive tablets, but also a high-quality book scanner for public use! So have a bunch of small paintings depicting the worries of common people in their everyday life, around two to three centuries ago:  "Praise be the eternal redeemer of Our Lord's Rest, Jesus Christ. This votive offering was left by Christoph Sebastian Fendt of Scheuring, who promised to undertake the pilgrimage during a dangerous jump across a trench."  Here you can see a family praying to Christ for a cure to the father's right leg. What exactly was wrong isn't detailed, but you can also see a wax leg placed on the altar, which was also a very common votive offering in case of pain and other bodily ailments, following an ancient belief that by this practice the pain would transfer onto the the fake leg.  "In 1734, Catharina Hollegerin promised to undertake a pilgrimage to Our Lord's Rest after her two children survived accidentally eating mouse poison"  Here you can see a toddler falling off a table...  ...and here it is a grown man doing the falling. The text reads "On July 26th, 1735, Lorenz Remensperger, a brick layer from St. Franziskus near Dasing, promised to do the pilgrimage after a high fall. He got better, praise be to God"  This votive tablet doesn't record the details of the case it depicts, but the priests of the church happened to write it into the church chronicles. Augustin Miller of Mering promised this votive offering after his 15 year old son Dominic fell into the river, got trapped below the mill wheel and was rescued by others before it was too late.  Sometimes it isn't clear at all going off the tablets what the underlying problem was for whose solution the votants were undertaking the pilgrimage. Here we see for example a woman depicted in front of the Fugger bank in Augsburg. Was she related to the Fugger family, or is this an allusion to financial sorrows plaguing her, or something else entirely?  And sometimes it's quite clear, like here with the crutches having been cast to the ground.  "On April 8, 1731, it happened in Landsberg that a small child which was only born the day before got subjected to a frenectomy and wouldn't stop bleeding for six hours straight afterwards. It got that bad that the barber-surgeon and all others present realised that it was impossible to stop the bleeding and that the innocent child would have to die within the next half hour. After promising a Holy Mass and a votive tablet to the miraculous place of mercy at Our Lord's Rest, and also by the intercession of St. John Nepomuk, the situation immediately got better and the child is still alive and healthy to this day."  "In 1810 I had the luck to come here for a great request for the first time, as my three and a half years old daughter suffered from great stone pain [ed: I guess kidney stones?]. I said my prayers and asked God for his divine help with a Holy Mass and votive offering. After four months, two stones like those pictured above were cast out from her body, and I and my daughter want to express our deepest gratitude to the Lord for this great mercy by placing this tablet here" And here is my absolute favourite from all the votive tablets in Our Lord's Rest because it's so colourful and almost cartoonish. This requires a small explanation beforehand: My hometown used to be a border town until 1806, and every day at 12 o'clock the city guard would fire off a cannon shot in the general direction of Augsburg both to give the time and to symbolise their preparedness towards anything the Augsburgers might have planned.  "On June 16, 1783, I, Sebastian Hänzler from Friedberg, fired off this cannon on the city walls, which burst into many pieces. Even though many people were in the vicinity, neither them nor I were hurt in any way. This is spectacular and a great miracle, for which our Lord in his Rest shall be praised"
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2019 00:38
|
|
|
Platystemon posted:I’m just saying that the wording makes it sound like the city walls exploded, but that makes little sense. Yeah, that was a bad translation on my part, sorry  I found another picture of a votive tablet at Our Lord's Rest (only in b/w tho, sadly), this time telling the story of a seriously unlucky man:  On the left hand it reads: "In the year 1758 on October 3rd I called to God in my woes. It happened at the house of me, Georg Draxel of Linderhof, when my six year old daughter accidentally set a pile of flax ablaze. I got burnt in my face and on my hands, and for a while I couldn't see anymore." And on the right: "The following year, 1758 on February 24th my wife went into troubled labour. They gave the child an emergency baptism [ed: sometimes that happened with dying children before they were actually born, they actually had special syringes for injecting holy water into the uterus] but it couldn't be delivered. O woe, o Lord, the child passed away. Doctor Deisch cut it into three parts in utero*, and that is what happend. At this hour my house still stands, my wife and I are strong and healthy, and our thanks and praise go to Our Lord's Rest!" *presumably so that he could get the body out of the poor woman, but otoh Deisch was so notorious that more than 60 years afterwards people still remembered him as a doctor who was more likely to leave you dead than healthy.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2019 15:18
|
|
|
Flossie posted:Those votives are amazing. Thanks so much. I will enjoy playing the boardgame Thurn and Taxis much more imagining the old beef Friedberg had with Augsburg Nothing past tense about it, those fuckers burned us down three times during the 14th century and never apologised! 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2019 22:42
|
|
|
Sulla Faex posted:Found this one recently of Carmen-Sylvia-Str. in Berlin (no idea who that was). I looked it up, and Carmen Sylva (no i) was the pseudonym under which the German-born queen of Romania, Elisabeth zu Wied (1843-1916) was publishing her many works as an author. She seems to have been a remarkable woman - if it hadn't been for her noble birth she would have become a teacher, she kept close contact with famous anti-imperialist and minority language supporter Georg Sauerwein throughout her life and when her husband sent one of her ladies-in-waiting into exile for what she perceived as unjust reasons, she packed her things and went into exile along.  That's her with her only child Maria, who died when she was only three years. Elisabeth never got over the loss, writing many years later: "How often, sadly, do I look at the locked door of what used to be your room. How often do I tell myself that it will open any moment, and I will see my sweet little child, coming toward me dance-like in small little steps, like she used to!" Also please try the comparison shot, the photo looks amazing!
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2019 07:25
|
|
|
I'm gonna play a little game: Germany's most famous weekly magazine Der SPIEGEL has made its archive publicly accessible, covering everything from 1946 to 2015. I will randomly choose three years during that timeframe, then randomly choose one issue out of each year and, besides posting a bit about the title, try to find the most interesting picture in one of the articles there. I hope the quality of the images will be bearable (sometimes the scans can be pretty bad), but let's see! 15/1956  (sadly, the covers aren't available in a higher resolution) The issue opens up with a big picture of William Somerset Maughan (1874-1965), who was supposedly the highest-paid author of the 1930s. At the time of the article, he was living in his villa in France where he would also die nine years later. But anyway, on to the article picture!  Oof, that's a spicy first find right there! The man in the middle is Marcel Bigeard, a French paratrooper who at the time was participating in the French government's efforts to quell the uprising in its colony of Algeria. The article describes with a not too small amount of admiration how Bigeard would turn around the military practices in Algeria, applying lessons (like helicopter warfare) he learned in Indochina to great effect. Well, hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but it really shouldn't come as a surprise that Bigeard was maybe the worst war criminal in a war that was super loving dirty to begin with. His 10th Parachute Division is said to have "disappeared" more than 4,000 people, with many thousands more being subjected to brutal torture. Bigeard ended up being France's highest decorated soldier ever and died nine years ago at 94 years old. 33/1959  The RNG has us stay in the 1950s, and wouldn't you know whom we meet as the cover picture? Der SPIEGEL used Tricky Dick's Moscow trip in 1959 (he was vice president under Eisenhower back then) as an occasion to portray this relatively young and extremely ambitious politician, calling him "the most anormal vice president of American history"  The picture I chose is also from that article, showing Nixon's wife Pat (1912-1993) together with the wifes of several high-ranking Soviet officials. On the leftmost side is Ashkhen Mikoyan (1898-1962). There is not a whole lot of info about her to be found online, so I'll have to describe the life of her husband here: Anastas Mikoyan (1895-1978) was an early supporter and comrade of Stalin, being born in Russian Armenia and growing up both there and in the mean streets of Tiflis. Mikoyan had a number of high cabinet posts under Stalin until he fell out of his favour (and was supposedly to be murdered in the next purge, which only didn't happen because Stalin died), then managed to get on good terms with Khrushchev, becoming first Vice President and finally (mainly ceremonial) head of state of the Soviet Union for some time. One of his most important achievements was his central role in the negotiations with Castro during the Cuban Missile Crisis - it was Mitoyan who managed to persuade Castro to have the Soviet missiles removed from the island altogether. Mitoyan (probably corrected) saw these negotiations as so important that he didn't even leave Cuba when his wife had died, sending his son instead. Pat Nixon was, as far as I can see, by all accounts a lovely woman whose only major flaw was that she was deeply in love with somebody like Richard Nixon (who, to be fair, sincerely loved her back). She was very active as a first lady (even though the press of the time often criticised her for appearing as too "domestic", stressing the traditional role of the housewife a bit too much), not only accompanying her husband on a multitude of foreign visits, but also acting as a representative of the US herself on trips to Africa and South America. Nina Petrovna Krushcheva (1900-1984, née Kukharchuk) was Krushchev's third wife. She was the daughter of well-off Ukrainian peasants and was an early supporter of the Bolshevik cause. After her husband's rise to power in 1953, she was the first real "first lady" in Soviet history, even though the two were only officially married in 1965. Krushcheva was highly talented, managing her husband's correspondence and schedule while being fluent or at least conversant in five languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, English and French). The last woman of the right is Alexandra Konstantinovna Kozlova, whose husband Frol Kozlov was another deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union. I couldn't find any info on her in a language I can speak, however (besides the fact that she hooked her son Oleg up with what would later become his wife), and so I have to talk about the husband instead again. Frol Kozlov (1908-1965) was born into a peasant family and quickly advanced within the local branch of the party in Leningrad. He got elected into the Politburo in 1957 and, for a time, was even rumoured to be Khrushchev's preferred successor until his having a stroke in 1963 destroyed that dream, thereby opening up the Breshnev's path to power. 41/1973  The title reads "Quarrel with Brandt" and show the two quarrelers: Herbert Wehner (1906-1990), legendary SPD (=social democrats in Germany) politican together with Willy Brandt (1913-1992), SPD chancellor from 1969 until 1974, when he unexpectedly had to step down after one of his closest associates was revealed to be an East German spy. At the time, Wehner and Brandt were fighting over how West Germany was supposed to deal with the Warsaw Pact states diplomatically, especially those who weren't either East Germany or the Soviet Union.  I took this picture from an article about the young and scarily successful Indian guru Prem Rawat, who back then was better known as "Maharaj Ji" (born 1957). When the article was published, Rawat was only 15 years old and yet venerated as a guru by up to six million people worldwide. His "Divine Light Mission" basically was a cult that - in the wake of the Indian craze mostly amongst 1970s leftist types - quickly garnered a substantial following not only in India, but also in the West and especially in the US. Since the 80s however, Rawat has distanced himself mostly from the culty and religious aspects of his earlier work.
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2019 00:50
|
|
|
Temaukel posted:Here. I tried cleaning up the picture somewhat: That's quite a bit clearer, thanks! How did you do it?
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2019 15:12
|
|
|
Temaukel posted:In Photoshop: Duplicated layer, applied Gaussian blur to the background layer, blended top layer with overlay mode, applied to the top layer some camera raw's noise reduction (luminance) with low luminance detail. Not for now, but that's good to know, thanks! I've got a bit of free time on my hands until the next thing comes up, so let's quickly do another round of the SPIEGEL game! 32/1975  The two gentlemen on the cover are the East German leader Erich Honecker and his West German counterpart, chancellor Helmut Schmidt in a story about growing trade relations between the two Germanys (Germanies?).  To the right we can see Giorgio Amendola (1907-1980), the deputy chairman of Italy's Communist Party at the time who was interviewed by the SPIEGEL for this issue. Amendola was the son of one of Italy's most influential (and fascinating) anti-fascist intellectuals who was murdered by blackshirts at the personal behest of Mussolini in 1925/26 (he died only a few months after the attack). His son Giorgio followed in his footsteps and secretly joined the communists in 1929, later playing an important role in the Italian resistance against the Wehrmacht. Shortly after the war, Amendola became the party's deputy leader and remained so until his death. Amendola was a part of the pragmatic wing within the Italian communist movement and tried to steer his party away from both Moscow and the various (quasi-)leftist terrorist movements influential at the time, positioning it as an independent leftist force instead and trying to win political power within the democratic framework of Western Europe. This so-called "Eurocommunism" was most popular in Italy, Spain and France, and Amendola was one of its most prominent representatives. His legacy endured in his political disciple Giorgio Napolitano, who was the first Italian communist to be elected president in 2006 and remains one of the country's most popular political figures. 50/1982  This is a pretty boring cover, sadly. It refers to the snap elections called in West Germany for early 1983, but I'll tell you more about that after I present you a picture...  ...of Karl Carstens (1914-1992), a conservative politican and president of West Germany at the time (1979-1984). The dominant topic in German media at the time was the succesfull vote of no confidence against chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Schmidt was a social democrat, whose party (the SPD) had been governing together with the market-liberal FDP since 1969. Schmidt was a member of the pragmatist wing within the SPD and had lost a lot of goodwill with his voter base due to his cautious and US-friendly stance in questions of national security and defence, particularly whether the US should be allowed to move additional middle-range nuclear missiles into West Germany. Even though politically weakened, Schmidt refused to engage with his coalition partner on a number of their demands in the fields of economic policy and social welfare. In September 1982, all FDP ministers stepped down at once, and the party broke its coalition with the SPD. Schmidt's remaining minority government was finally ended by a vote of no confidence orchestrated by the conservative Helmut Kohl together with FDP support. Kohl pulled a number of dubious legal moves to bring early elections about (the experiences of Weimar Germany made it so that the German constitution makes it really hard to call snap elections), which were finally approved by president Carstens in December. Kohl won the elections in a landslide and would remain Germany_s longest-governing chancellor until his defeat during the 1998 federal elections (although it looks like his former protegé Merkel might get on his level too, as long as she can make it until 2021). 20/2003  Another boring cover, this time about the perceived inability of the German constitution to allow for reforms. You can see how the popular attitudes of the time were in that article - the magazine (a nominally leftist one, remember) slobbers over the idea of radical cuts in social welfare in order to boost the economy and honestly seems to wish for a "strong man" to get through with it.  Oh, and in the meantime we've also arrived at coloured print! This is from a short but interesting article about North Koreans living in Japan, who venerate and actively support Juche from a distance. Their main organisation was and is Chongryon, an unofficial representation of the North Korean in Japan which runs a lot of businesses that financially support the regime in addition to kindergardens, schools and even a university for North Koreans in Japan (the article's picture was made in one of those schools in Tokyo). The wiki article on the organisation remarks that it has seen a decline in membership over the last years, which is also observed (as a recent development, however) in the article.
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2019 18:04
|
|
|
 Two sumo wrestlers going at it in Tokyo, sometime during the 1890s
|
|
#
¿
May 16, 2019 22:03
|
|
|
Former DILF posted:
Historical hotties, you say? https://twitter.com/FaeHerself/status/1091633775631454209
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2019 10:10
|
|
|
 This is a drawing of Jakob Joseph Matthys (1802-1866), a Catholic priest, polyglot and linguist from Switzerland with a seriously fascinating life.  The small village you can see above is Oberrickenbach, where Matthys was born in 1802 into a poor family as the eldest of eight children, of which only six reached adulthood. His parents worked as day labourers after they had to give up their small farmstead. Matthys had to work from an early age on, herding goats, spinning cotton, gathering resin and firewood and working as a farmhand. There was no compulsory education in the Canton of Nidwalden back then, and Matthys racked up a grand total of 30 days in school up to his 21st birthday. He was nothing but gifted, however. Reading, writing, maths and standard German were all things he taught himself, and when he was 15 it was said that everybody in the area knew that young Matthys was the person to ask when something needed to be calculated. At 19, he left Switzerland for Germany like thousands of other Swiss children from a poor background (who continued to do so well into the 20th century) and worked for a year in the services of a Bavarian nobleman. With the little money he made there, he was able to buy a Latin-German dictionary and grammar he took with him back to Switzerland, where he started herding cows. Matthys had a lot of free time sitting in the mountains and watching over the livestock, so he started to learn Latin from the book and eventually memorised the whole thing. A local chaplain realised that Matthys was in fact insanely talented and tried to support him as well as he good. In 1823, Matthys was finally able to visit a Latin school in Stans led by Capuchin monks. Even though his regular education beforehand was basically nil, he was able to graduate after two and a half years instead of the normal four. The next years he spent studying at various Catholic schools and seminaries in central Switzerland, and in 1831 he was ordained a priest.  Matthys was still essentially poor, however, and besides himself had to support his family too. For this reason he chose the first job offered to him after his ordination and took up the chaplaincy in Maria Rickenbach (seen above), a pilgrimage church near to where he grew up. Matthys quickly had to realise that the posting was not all that it had been made out to be: there were hardly any pilgrims nor children he was supposed to teach, the church was nestled deep in the mountains far away from everywhere else and the 500 guilders he was paid per year barely were enough for himself, let aside supporting his family and paying for medical care (Matthys tended to be sick a lot). What he had in spades, though, was free time. Matthys spent the next 14 years at Maria Rickenbach teaching himself as many languages as possible. Some he already had acquired in the years before, but in his isolation Matthys spent every penny he could spare on various books, eventually learning a whopping 38 languages all by himself (with varying degrees of fluency, of course). Where possible, he learned from textbooks and dictionaries; where this wasn't feasible for a language he was interested in, he would instead try to compare a text in said language with a translation into a language he already knew. This didn't really mean that he was fluent in any of those, however, and Matthys knew that himself. In a letter to a friend he admitted that he had never heard a single English word spoken in his life and was himself unable to actually speak it, even though he was able to write in English (not all that well, but understandably enough). Even though he disliked his job at Rickenbach, Matthys was for a long time unable to find a new one. This might also have been due to his personality, which was said to have been difficult at times and was almost certainly exacerbated by his isolation (which in turn also made it difficult for him to hear of any job openings in time). It took him fourteen years to finally transfer to a more lively chaplaincy in Dallenwil, a 730 people village near the cantonal capital. Suddenly his schedule was full there, especially with his new obligations as a village teacher in which he put a lot of time and energy into. It was also better paid at ~730 guilders a year, but his workload now meant that he was unable to focus as much on language learning as he used to be in Rickenbach.  That's not Robin Williams up there, but Friedrich Staub (1826-1896), an academic from Zürich who in 1862 started to prepare the work for the Schweizerisches Idiotikon, a massive dictionary that was supposed to encompass all spoken varieties of German in Switzerland. Staub sent out letters all over the country in which he asked local scholars for help. By chance, Matthys (who at the time was already very sick and basically lay dying) heard of the project and mobilised all his remaining strength into fulfilling Staub's request. Staub immediately realised the brillance of Matthys, supporting him both financially and, more importantly, by giving him the sort of appreciation that Matthys hadn't really gotten before. After only a few months of frantic work, he sent in a first list of 2,500 words of the Nidwalden dialect. Until 1864, Matthys filled 611 pages with his both tiny and tidy handwriting, noting down tens of thousands of words and even authoring a comprehensive 89-page grammar of his native dialect. Staub was stunned by the fervour and thoroughness by which the linguistic autodidact went to work. Matthys' work being directly incoporated into the Idiotikon meant that hardly anybody else got to knew of Matthys' efforts, even though Staub repeatedly praised him in public. Only generations later, Swiss linguists would realise the true extent and quality of Matthys' work. Matthys spent the last months of his life at the hospital in Stans where he died in 1866, forgotten by most but his immediate family and Staub. His younger brother Benedikt, who also had become a priest, wrote onto his tombstone: quote:By God's will you drank from it,  edit: Matthys wrote his autobiography in 35 languages - each chapter in a different one and finally the entire work in standard German again. In the 1980s, his biographer Iso Baumer asked various linguists to judge the quality of Matthys' writing in the many languages. It turned out that Matthys had a good to very good command of Persian, Ancient Greek, Latin, Old French, Syriac, Ge'ez, Russian and Czech. Still pretty commendable were his writings in Old Occitan, Rumansh, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Polish, Sorbian, Slovenian, Old Hebrew, Chaldean and Hungarian. "Still understandable" were Sanskrit, Modern Greek, Italian, Spanish, Poruguese, French, English, Middle Hebrew and Maghrebi Arabic, while his Arabic, Chinese (probably Mandarin) and Malay are basically incomprehensible without the accompanying German translation. He also had trouble writing Chinese script, whereas all other non-Latin scripts were pretty legible. System Metternich has a new favorite as of 17:03 on May 22, 2019 |
|
#
¿
May 22, 2019 16:54
|
|
|
Two photos out of a small series from pictures of recent German history I found especially striking: Children in West Berlin playing wall-building while the real Berlin wall is built only a few blocks away (1961)  A young Syrian girl that just arrived in Germany gets to play in the snow for the first time (2015)
|
|
#
¿
May 31, 2019 18:27
|
|
|
The Imperial and Royal War Press was a division of the Austro-Hungarian army command established at the beginning of World War I in 1914 and coordinated the Empire's propaganda effort for the entire duration of the war. Hundreds of the country's best painters, photographers, movie makers and authors were employed in order to portray the imperial forces in the best possible light, amongst them names like Robert Musil, Egon Erwin Kisch, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Stefan Zweig and Alfred Kubin. The War Press' photo collection, encompassing 118 volumes altogether, were digitised some years ago and can be accessed here. Let's take a short and somewhat random look through the collection, shall we?  An Italian airplane after being forced to land (1917). In the background the pilgrimage church of Maria Gail in Carinthia  A douser and some Austrian soldiers (1916)  Some R&R with a bottle of Chianti (1917)  This one's simply titled "Fallen Italians" (1917)  A Catholic priest bringing the Eucharist to the sick (no date)  Children's party at the episcopal palace in Vienna (1916) System Metternich has a new favorite as of 16:10 on Jun 4, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Jun 4, 2019 16:08
|
|
|
Gonna take this thread out of its summer slumber: The Deutsche Fotothek has digitised and made accessible thousands of photographs and motives of German postcard publisher Brück & Sohn, dating from the 1880s to 1989. The Fotothek is somewhat notorious for taking things that legally should be public and free and charging hefty fees for the download, but thankfully it's quite easy to grab their data nonetheless! A Chinese family in LA, 1903  Women plucking Tea on the Lehtenty Estate in Ceylon, c. 1897  Catholic monk in the garden of Santa Barbara Mission, CA, 1903
|
|
#
¿
Aug 20, 2019 18:34
|
|
|
What the hell, while I'm at it I might as well show off some other collections of the Fotothek. Here for example is its Sorbian collection: The Sorbs are a Slavic-speaking minority in Germany that mainly lives in the states of Saxony and Brandenburg. They are divided into Upper and Lower Sorbs, who speak different yet mutually intelligible dialects (some might also say languages). Until the early 20th century, they settled in a contiguous area where they were the majority (except in the larger cities, which were mainly populated by German speakers) and at its peak in around 1800 might have numbered more than 250,000 people. Assimilation, Germanisation, expulsion due to war and coal mining and two German dictatorships led to a strong decline, however. Now there are about 60,000 self-identified Sorbs left, of which about a third still speaks the language. Most of the self-identified Sorbs live in the Catholic Upper Sorbian area, whereas the Lower Sorbian language and culture have nearly gone extinct by now. The town of Serbin, Texas, was originally founded by Sorbian emigrants. The Fotothek's Sorbian collection covers about 21,000 pictures from the 1860s to the 1980s.  A Lower Sorbian woman in mourning, 1870  A farmstead in Trjebin/Trebendorf, c. 1890  Sorbian baptism, c. 1896  Passenger transport on the river Spree in Lědy/Lehde, 1896  Lower Sorbian women in the traditional spinning attire, 1900  Catholic Sorbs from Kulow/Wittichenau in the attire traditionally worn to confession, 1905  Protestant mourning attire in Klětno/Klitten, 1905  The traditional Catholic Sorbian Easter procession in Budyšin/Bautzen, c. 1940  Representatives of the Sorbian association at a local conference of the socialist party of East Germany, 1956  A Sorbian wedding couple in Budyšin/Bautzen, 1980s  Not from the Fotothek, but still interesting: protests against a planned eviction of the villagers due to coal mining in Klětno/Klitten, 1990. System Metternich has a new favorite as of 19:26 on Aug 20, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Aug 20, 2019 19:23
|
|
|
Krankenstyle posted:Bunch of photos from the archives of the Cryolite Mining and Trading Company (1854–1987) that ran mines in Ivigtut, Greenland have been put online, including a photo album from a private teacher, Ellen Jacobi, who taught the son of the company director 1910–12. In the same vein, I've got something for the Americans following this sleepy thread: The Illinois State Library aquired more than a million negatives from the Pantagraph, a Central Illinois newspaper established in 1837. They aim to digitise all of them, and they put the first bunch now online: Nearly 37,000 photos showing life in Central Illinois between 1933 and 1944  Bum camp, 1935  Police officers and a couple of johns arrested at a brothel raid, 1935  Baptist centennial banquet, men with false moustaches, 1937  4-H club cattle judging contest, 1937  President's birthday ball, 1939  Crowd of people around wrecked car, 1940  Police examine a murder scene in Colfax, 1941  Aluminum Drive at Bloomington courthouse, 1941 System Metternich has a new favorite as of 21:11 on Oct 4, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Oct 4, 2019 21:09
|
|
|
You know, I wanted to get a better feeling in what sort of area these photos had been taken, so I went to youtube and searched for "central illinois", but all it gave me was pages and pages of poo poo like this: So now I guess that central Illinois is mostly synonymous for "flat" and "fuckall to do". How close am I?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2019 18:46
|
|
|
No idea how long it takes until a thread falls off into the archives, so I'm just gonna crosspost this post of mine over in the historical fun facts thread:System Metternich posted:
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2019 22:13
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 21:17 |
|
|
Come on guys, we're talking French nobility here It's not fetish porn, it's a curiosité erotique
|
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2019 18:08
|
|