Can we ever know the past or are there just fragments and stories?
CULTURE & ETHICS:
TRACES OF THE PAST #10 – AMSTERDAM – 2020 Gary Glitter (real name Paul Gadd), was a successful glam rocker in the 1970s, selling over 20 million records. In 1999 he was sentenced to 4 months in prison for possession of child pornography. Later, he was convicted several times for child sexual abuse, ending in 2015 when he was sentenced to 16 years in prison for having sex with a girl under the age of 13. Is it ever OK to listen to the music of this convicted paedophile? Can we separate the artist from his art? I decided to throw out all my Gary Glitter records (Glitter, Touch Me, Boys Will Be Boys) and all the other glam rock albums I owned.
ECONOMY & ETHICS:
TRACES OF THE PAST #18 – COLMAR – 2020 I didn’t know the French liked rum so much. Negrita rum is distilled on the French islands of Réunion, Guadeloupe, and Martinique in the Caribbean. In the colonial era, rum production depended on the labor of slaves to harvest the sugar cane. Advertising this Caribbean drink with a picture of a black girl seems reasonable. Who doesn’t want to be served by a black servant? To this day, the logo of the Negrita brand is this black girl, but in their ads they now show a more diverse group of ethnical mixed young people, dancing in the Caribbean sun.
CULTURE & ECONOMY:
TRACES OF THE PAST #12 – ZANDVOORT – 2020 Between the 16th and the 20th century a wide range of Chinese porcelain was made (almost) exclusively for export to Europe and later to North America. In 1602 and 1604, two Portuguese ships were captured by the Dutch and their cargos, which included thousands of items of porcelain, were sold off at an auction, igniting a great interest for Chinese export porcelain in Holland. Between 1602 and 1682 the VOC (Dutch East India Company) carried between 30 and 35 million pieces of porcelain. Not all cargos arrived intact, sometimes shipwrecks took their toll. Were these Chinese vases, now washed up on the Dutch seashore, part of this global trade?
RELIGION & POLITICS:
TRACES OF THE PAST #19 – BREMGARTEN – 2020 When did this Madonna and Child end up in the river Reuss? Was it in 1529, when Bremgarten became a Protestant city? But the city was re-Catholicised only two years later, after the Second War of Kappel. Or was it in 1712, after the Second Villmerger War, when the official religion changed back to Protestantism again? For a long time there was no individual freedom of religion in Switzerland. Everybody had to adopt the faith of their rulers (‘cuius regio, eius religio’). Dissenters who didn’t want to convert had to emigrate to a region where their faith was the state religion. Or they could hide their faith (and maybe even throw away a Madonna and Child sculpture) just to be on the safe side….
CULTURE & POLITICS:
TRACES OF THE PAST #13 – KUSNACHT – 2020 When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Nobel Prize Winner Thomas Mann was told that it would no longer be safe for him to live in Germany, so he fled to Switzerland. From 1933 to 1938 he lived in exil in Küsnacht. I wonder, did he write his novel ‘Lotte in Weimar’ on this old Continental typewriter I found in the garden of his villa (Schiedhaldenstrasse 33)?
PHILOSOPHY & ECONOMY:
TRACES OF THE PAST #15 – TRIER – 2020 The writings of Karl Marx were hugely influential. They were an inspiration for the Russian Marxists, led by Lenin in 1917, and the Chinese Marxists, led by Mao in 1949, but they also inspired the student movement of the 1960s, in hopes of realizing a more fully democratic and inclusive version of Marx’s original vision of social justice. Well, this copy of Das Kapital is not likely to inspire anyone anymore. So, whose writings can inspire us in a time when capital has run amok, a time of wage stagnation and growing social inequality?
ECONOMY & POLITICS:
TRACES OF THE PAST #16 – QUEDLINBURG – 2020 Why was there no proper building maintenance in communist East Germany? Why did their inner cities look like slums? The main reason was a permanent rent freeze: it was their way to keep the wages low. But it also meant: no repair, no renovation, no maintenance. After the reunification of Germany a massive renovation project started. But even after 30 years of capitalism not all buildings are fixed. Can these bundles of East German Marks (with the portrait of Karl Marx) still be put to good use?
ECONOMY & HISTORY:
TRACES OF THE PAST #14 – AACHEN – 2020 I drank a cappuccino in a café in Aachen and left the waitress a tip of 100 million Mark.
14 thoughts on “New work”