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Archeology

Pulling Strings.

What would you say are the most important tools harnessed by early mankind? Fire? The Wheel? Agriculture? Does string even come to mind?

It did not, for me, until I embarked on a bit of reading about the history of string after I was stupefied by an archeological find that dates some 35.000 years back, a tool that allowed a small group of people working together to produce meters and meters of strong rope in about 10 minutes.

Single threads are not particularly useful. Twist them into yarn, though, or make yarn into strands, or strands into string and then ropes, and you have something that powerfully affects your interactions with the world. Our idioms tell the tale: learn the ropes, spin a yarn, hang by a thread, tie the knot, thread the needle, string along, cut the cord, moral fibre, loose the thread – where was I?

“A string can cut, choke, and trip; it can also link, bandage, and reel. String makes it possible to sew, to shoot an arrow, to strum a chord. It’s difficult to think of an aspect of human culture that is not laced through with some form of string or rope; it has helped us develop shelter, clothing, agriculture, weaponry, art, mathematics, and oral hygiene. Without string, our ancestors could not have domesticated horses and cattle or efficiently plowed the earth to grow crops. If not for rope, the great stone monuments of the world—Stonehenge, the Pyramids at Giza, the moai of Easter Island—would still be recumbent. In a fiberless world, the age of naval exploration would never have happened; early light bulbs would have lacked suitable filaments; the pendulum would never have inspired advances in physics and timekeeping.” (Ref.)

We lace our shoes with string, we get sewn up on the operating table with string, our clothes are woven from twisted fibers, and much of what is tied in knots depends on cordage. Hunting or camping involves plenty of ropes. String has been used as a form of mathematical expression by indigenous people in South America thousands of years ago. A system of knots and tassels hanging from a central strand would record census data and tax information. The language of modern technology refers to strings and threads as well – string theory, web-sites, links, Threads (e.g. the replacement site harboring all of us fleeing from formerly known as Twitter.)

One of the biggest and most consequential uses of string were, of course, the ropes and woven sails that enabled naval exploration: centuries of warfare, colonialism, but also economic trade and scientific exploration depended on cordage that made those boats functional. It was not just the rigging of sails. You also need rope to tow ships, and, to this day, tie even modern ships in harbor. You need hoist cables for cranes, winches, and dumbwaiters as well as woven fenders.

The history books tied rope making to early inventions and practices in Egypt, between 2000 and 1750 BCE. But archeologists knew of much earlier use by indigenous people of ready-made threads, like grasses, vines and pliable roots. Eventually people discovered that you can twist the fibers extracted from plants and animals into ropes, with pliable plants like agave, coconut, cotton, willow, and pond reeds producing strong fibers.

Here is the finding that blew my mind: archeologists unearthed tools made in the Paleolithic, some 35.000 – 40.000 years ago, that were used to manufacture rope. Excavated from a cave in southwest Germany, these are ivory batons, about 8 inches long, that have four holes containing 6 precisely carved, sharp spiral grooves.

The scientists experimented with replicas of the tools (called a Lochstab in German) to see what could possibly be processed with them.

“Individual holes of the Lochstab did not prove effective for pretreating sinew, flax, nettles, and hemp, but we achieved positive results for cattail, linden, and willow. Cattail was particularly applicable because the Lochstab could help to remove the starch for consumption by crushing the outer harder surface of the stems while separating the fibers for cordage. The use of cattail for making rope is well documented ethnographically, and archaeological accounts exist, in particular for later periods. Cattail is highly useful for food, cordage, and basketry.

The tool’s relevance lies in making thicker, stronger rope consisting of two to four strands. We twisted and fed bundles of cattail leaves through the holes. The holes help to maintain a regular thickness of the strands and facilitate the addition of new material necessary for making long stretches of rope. The grooves help to break down the leaves and orient the fibers while maintaining the torsion needed for rope making. The four-holed tool is then pulled with regular speed over the strands . Behind the tool, the strands combine automatically into a rope as a result of their twisting tension. The number of holes used determines the thickness of the rope. Because one person is needed to twist and maintain tension on each of the strands and one to operate the Lochstab, three to five people would be needed to use a four-holed Lochstab for rope making. Our experiments using cattail and four or five participants typically produced 5 m of strong and supple rope in 10 min.”

What fascinates me is not just that they figured out this tool per se. Using it also required social cooperation, communication and shared goals, bonding the people to each other and thus gaining an advantage over groups that had less developed technology and reciprocal labor. Shared labor led to in-group cohesion, augmenting survival. 35.000 years ago!

Here are some musical references to skipping rope – a childhood activity I preferred much over tug-of-war, wouldn’t you know it. There is Ukrainian composer Viktor Kosenko‘s 24 Children pieces that include jumping rope, Khatchaturian‘s Skipping rope, there is the Children’s Suite Op. 9 by Ding-Shande, really a sweet piece also referring to jumprope, and a piece for harp by Carlos Salzedo that includes Skipping Rope.

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Communal Power

Explore with me, for a second time this week. Checking out a community garden in Altadena that allots parcels of land for growing all kinds of things, though mostly vegetables. And then visiting Arlington Garden in Pasadena, three acres that the city entrusted to a non-profit that collaborated with a host of other groups to establish a botanical garden. The city of Pasadena, Pasadena Department of Public Works, and Pasadena Water & Power, with help from Pasadena Beautiful Foundation, the Mediterranean Garden Society, garden clubs, local businesses, nurseries, neighbors and friends established the garden and continually support the maintenance of the site.

Community gardens provide a terrific way of growing inexpensive, nutritious and organic food. Wait lists are long, because people enjoy the possibility of working their own little plot just as much as the output. Health benefits are not restricted to better food, though. These gardens serve as meeting places where people mix, get to know each other, share common interests and often join to improve local conditions, all of which combats isolation and other adverse psychological states.

Arlington Garden is a bit more ambitious in creating an environment for an entire community, not just plot leasers who happen to cooperate here or there. The garden introduces different forms of landscapes, thus teaching about botany and water efficient gardening.

It has locally sourced art positioned throughout, magnets for kids who squeal over the discovery of yet another frog, and grounds for benign amusement for discerning adults…

Poor St Francis of Assisi has a crack in his neck….

Importantly, it has tons of opportunities for sitting and enjoying the garden, from single chairs to large groups of furniture, inviting friends in. As a certified wildlife habitat garden it attracts tons of insects and birds – I am sure to hang out there quite a bit with the camera in the coming weeks.

The communal aspect is of considerable interest given that we have new archeological findings that document the advantage of communal efforts. It’s actually fascinating stuff. A group of archeologists investigated 24 central places in prehistoric (1000 – 300 BCE) Mesoamerica (now Mexico,) some of which lasted for over 1000 years. The researchers were interested in why some of these cities existed longer than others, and looked at a number of variables that might have contributed to or deterred from the sustainability of these centers. Some of the key factors that contributed to longevity were early infrastructural investments, high degrees of economic interdependence and collaboration between domestic units, and collective governance. In other words, autocratically governed cities were disadvantaged during antiquity.

The establishment of housing that was densely built and connected with paths to each other and the creation of large, central, open plazas were two of the factors that helped cities to flourish. In addition to these architectural specifics they found this:

” In general, more collective organizations were funded by internal financing—labor drafts and staple goods exacted from local populations. This contrasts with the external resourcing associated with more autocratic regimes, dependent on elite estates, monopolization of the exchange of precious goods, and war booty. Collective governance tended to be ‘faceless,’ associated with offices rather than aggrandized individuals, with power distributed. Concentrated power arrangements tended to be personalized, frequently tied to descent and often conspicuous in individualized funerary treatments and monuments to specific rulers. Whereas autocratic governance frequently was focused on the palaces or mortuary monuments of individual rulers, characterized by restricted access to non-elites, more collective formations tended to be associated with accessible plazas, open access ways, and disseminations of public goods.“

Public spaces mattered, for contemplation, information exchange and communal expression. Some of the longest lasting centers had up to 20 ball courts where people could meet, and all had central plazas. Pooled labor mattered, since terracing for food production and appropriate drainage could only be achieved communally. The interconnectedness between households prevented population flight, keeping population density high which in turn helped to produce labor that fed and maintained the citizenry.

It makes, of course a difference if you have 40.000 people, or 3.8 million, like the greater L.A. area, for the ability to make communal decisions, and not govern from above. But we should pause and think through the principles that conferred resilience to these ancient population centers, many of which lead back to connectedness and openings for communication. What you find, on a micro-level, when hanging out in a free, communal botanical garden.

Here is some music reminiscent of mesoamerican traditions.

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Moving along

I skimmed two unusual books across the last weeks. Skimmed because I could not read 700 pages for one and who knows how many for the other before giving them as Hanukah presents to the kids. But I read enough (plus the reviews) to form an opinion that I can recommend them if you are willing to have your mind blown by one, and learn surprising facts in the other. Long slog today, so you are allowed to skim as well. But another wet weekend might give you enough time to read…

I am talking about The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow (which I will definitely finish in full when my library loan comes through,) and Move by Parag Khanna.

The Dawn of Everything is a strange, mesmerizing window into the authors’ minds, who are willing to speculate about everything that has been accepted theory about 40.000 years of human history. The anthropology and archeology duo tackle the question if durable hierarchies in the form of nation states are inevitable. Nation states are usually assumed to be the outcome of a natural process due to the development of agriculture, accumulation of property that requires protection and increased population sizes amassed in cities, all leading to leadership hierarchies, domination exerted by state power and bureaucracies. The duo claims that nation states, and in particular undemocratically governed nation states are not at all inevitable, contrary to popular opinion. They point to alternative ways of humans organizing themselves and their lives across history from the very start.

The book is a tour de force of speculation, offering (elsewhere disputed) facts that help question the accepted wisdom of historians. The authors provide example after example of early human societies that avoided states, or subverted them, or decided to accept hierarchies during some times of the year and not during others. The authors certainly make the point that early societies were not in a natural state (innocents in the Enlightenment’s view, or brutes in Hobbes’) until agriculture inevitably changed the picture from an egalitarian to a hierarchical society. Instead they show that hunters and gatherers built their societies intentionally, with consensus. Some showed all signs of democratic approaches, others had inequality already built in. There were endless configurative possibilities and people made choices among them.

So why are we now stuck with nation states? Without providing an answer, the book challenges us to think through if there is STILL a possibility for alternatives, something the authors strongly believe. The classic reasons for statist views of history lie potentially with the fact that people can no longer easily move somewhere else if they dislike a given country, and the fact that bureaucracies have grown to impenetrable proportions. But Graeber and Wengrow show that many early cities thrived for centuries with no sign of hierarchy, contradicting scholars who assume that authoritarian rule appears naturally whenever large populations gather.

I found the book empowering not because it answers questions (it often doesn’t) or simply defies common assumptions (it always does.) It provides a model of a fresh approach when you question things differently. If you no longer think that there has to be an overarching pattern or law that inevitably governs the progression of human development then you can start to think through what alternatives could look like and how to bring them about. You can look at evidence for alternatives or interpret data in a new light. And once you acknowledge the possibility for human intervention, you can alter mind sets and explore ways how to change the status quo of domination of some over others.

The authors worked on this book for 10 years, planning more volumes to come. Graeber died suddenly of an infection at a young age shortly after completion. Here is a written portrait of this unusual, gifted man.

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So why would I read Move when the author is dissed like this from a New Republic review for a previous book:

“Khanna’s contempt for democracy and human rights aside, he is simply an intellectual impostor, emitting such lethal doses of banalities, inanities, and generalizations that his books ought to carry advisory notices. Take this precious piece of advice from his previous book—the modestly titled How to Run the World—which is quite representative of his work: “The world needs very few if any new global organizations. What it needs is far more fresh combinations of existing actors who coordinate better with one another.” How this A-list networking would stop climate change, cyber-crime, or trade in exotic animals is never specified. Khanna does not really care about the details of policy. He is a manufacturer of abstract, meaningless slogans. He is, indeed, the most talented bullshit artist of his generation. And this confers upon him a certain anthropological interest.“

Okaaaayyyyy. In German you would say this reviewer “had a louse crawling across his liver.” Same origin as the phrase “he’s an offended liverwurst” – since antiquity the liver was assumed to be the seat of emotions, and even as small a trigger as a louse could torpedo one’s mood. Never mind a bullshit artist. But I digress.

Let’s just say, I occasionally try and read widely and consciously from people I don’t necessarily agree with. And you know what? There were some interesting things to be learned from this book and it spoke to the issues of mobility and migration which played also such a role in the volume discussed above. Khanna makes an argument for opening up international borders, given the inevitable future mass migrations due to climate and political factors combined. He proclaims mobility across borders as a human right. He sees realignments likely to be regional (the millions of displaced Asian people will move into Kazakhstan, displaced Chinese will move into Russia, and Central Americans into Canada – all of which have tons of empty space that can be settled with the change in temperatures and according agricultural possibilities.)

The author argues that we need to move people to resources and technologies to people, something that will not happen if we cling to nativist notions of sovereignty. The question is how can you preserve geographic nation states that people feel culturally rooted in and move beyond sovereignty at the same time, into shared administration and stewardship of crucial geographies and resources?

He uses the examples of Canada and, surprisingly, Japan, as nations that have a futuristic outlook towards opening their borders to migrants. Khanna speculates that Europe will attract masses of Asian youth talent, while the nativist US stays behind. He also shows that migration needs to be done sustainably, so that newly opening eco systems are not trampled and then have to be deserted again and gives claimed catch-all phrases like “cosmopolitan utilitarianism” at face value, (the notion of holding all people equal and maximizing their happiness or welfare seems a bit of lip service in his rendering), we should debate how we can move towards open borders and mass wealth redistribution. Here is a summary article where the author explains his position.

In the context of pandemics and the emergence of newer, scarier variants, I believe one might indeed think through how more globally organized administrative powers would protect humanity as a whole. We can close borders all we want to, viruses and other invisible agents will always have a way to escape across them. If we do not coordinate research, prevention and treatment it is only a matter of time until things get worse, and no riches and fortified national castles will protect us. Decisions to give priority to pharmaceutical companies’ investments over radical, global distribution of available vaccines has been rather short sighted.

In any case, both books help move our thinking along, particularly when we don’t agree with some or much of what the authors offer. Just the right thing for late December when the holiday hectic calms down and you need an excuse not to leave the house or the couch on yet another rain soaked day or are forced into lockdown, and can tackle something more than the next mystery novel.

Photos today of birds last week on Sauvie Island, all of whom ignore borders.

Music today can be ambient listening, sustaining dreams of a better future, if reading becomes too cumbersome.

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Whose Bones?

Can’t help but photographing the Halloween decorations on my walks. This year the skeletons are in abundance, with but a sprinkling of spiders, witches, and other ghouls.

Someone must have robbed the Smithsonian where tens of thousands of bones are stored. Scratch that – bad joke. The controversy over these human remains is anything but funny. Here is what I learned from a CodeSwitch program:

It turns out that the Smithsonian’ National Museum of Natural History has a huge ware house behind barbed wire in a suburb in Maryland where the bones from archeological digs are stored. More than 10 000 of them belong to Native American people, some of them full skeletons, all in drawers in a climate controlled, windowless building.

Some 1500 of them have been dug up in Florida, and a native tribe, the Seminoles, has been fighting for over a decade to get them back. Museums, who received them across the last hundreds of years in common archeological practice, want to hold on to them.

In 1989 Congress passed a law that called for repatriation of Native American remains (many of which had been literally excavated from dedicated cemeteries by grave robbers and archeologists alike) and included the Smithsonian in a direct appeal. The museum released about a third of their holdings, but is refusing to part with the rest. The reason? They will only allow repatriation if they have connected the remains with a specific federally recognized tribe, and they do so by establishing a “cultural affiliation,” which implies a process that could for all intents and purposes drag on forever. They said they needed evidence like treaties, cultural artifacts, ways of life, geographical location; that evidence is rarely easily available, however, since these remains were dug up in over 80 different locations, by numerous parties, some recording details, others not. It is an institutionalized process filled with loop holes that allows the museums to hold on to the remains without (illegally)claiming they are theirs. It was purposely built to depend on the subjective judgement of the museum administrators, not exactly a neutral party. (Evidence for this can be found in the fact that three different museums came up with three different judgments for tribal connection for bones taken all from the same site. There is simply no objective standard.)

And so the bones rest in a kind of purgatory in those drawers.

The museum’s rationale for holding on to the remains is the possibility that future questions might be answered by investigating them, questions that depend on future technology, for example. That stands in contrast to the Native American insistence for return now, since their beliefs are connected to the need for their ancestors to rest in peace.

Nobody doubts, by the way, that the contemporary Seminoles and the ancient remains are biologically related. But the museum insists on cultural affiliation, and that is in itself so hard to establish without decisive evidence – an excuse to deny repatriation. The question remains why the museum is the arbiter of what belongs to whom, instead of the Seminoles who have oral traditions and belief systems that connect them to the remains.

Ten years into the controversy the tribe started a public campaign #nomorestolenancestors, with public lectures, appeals to congress, resolutions by national tribal representatives and organization urging the museum to give back the remains. The Seminole History Museum publicly ended its relationship with the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian eventually agreed last year to develop a new policy that allows members of the Seminole tribe to look at the remains and identify who they think are ancestors to be returned. They then have to report the result to the museum which in turn will ask all the other Florida tribes to make their claims. If there are no competing demands, the ancestors will be returned. It could take decades.

Here is an interesting book by anthropologist Chip Cowell – Plundered Skulls And Stolen Spirits; Inside The Fight To Reclaim Native America’s Culture – that fills in the details of the debate.

Music today appropriate for Halloween….

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A Change of Occupiers

The first humans to come to what we now call the United States got here on foot. They crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Asia some 20.000 years ago, perhaps even 30.000 – 40.000 years ago. They made their way up and down the coast by boats, nomadic tribes often driven to new places by changes in climate. Scarcity of food led to various intertribal fighting for resources, a culture fostering warriors, but also to tribal migration to climes where they could eventually settle.

The North American Indian people who live in permanent compact settlements in New Mexico are known as Pueblos, descending from the pre-historic Ancestral Pueblo people (Anasazi). The eastern Pueblo villages are in New Mexico along the Rio Grande and comprise groups who speak Tanoan and Keresan languages, comprised of Tiwa, Town and Tewa, as well as Athabaskan.

At the time the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1539, the Pueblos had autonomously governed villages, where decisions were made in subterranean ceremonial chambers called Kivas. Hunting and gathering was supplanted by farming of corn, squash and cotton – the only crops available. Complex irrigation ditches were constructed and lined with clay to preserve water (the latter giving archeologists a leg up in mapping the water systems.) Plant plots were sheltered with gravel to prevent evaporation. Societies were matrilineal (inheritance went down the female line) and matrilocal (boys married into the villages of the girls.)

Hunting was communal, including the hunt for rabbits – up to 60 people at a time would cut their hair and weave it into hare-nets, enormously long structures that snared the bunnies, some persevered from 11.000 BC in the museum where I learned all the rest of it: the MUSEUM OF INDIAN ARTS AND CULTURE in Santa Fe.

I had gone there to explore their exhibit Beyond Standing Rock which highlights encroachments and violations of Native American sovereignty, many of which have impacted Native health and sacred lands and describes what led up to the DAPL protests. http://miaclab.org/current&eventID=4044

As luck would have it, I was invited to a practically private 2 hour tour of the museum with an incredibly knowledgeable docent, who taught about the archeological finds, but also the bloody history the Pueblo people had to endure. Although they managed, after 90 years of Spanish colonization, to unite in rebellion and reclaim their land and independence (as well as the horses, sheep and fruit trees introduced by the conquistadores,) that success didn’t last long.

https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/10/1680-the-pueblo-revolt/

After the reconquest in 1691, villages adapted to colonial rule by incorporating some aspects of the dominant culture necessary for survival while maintaining the basic fabric of traditional cultured in some instances converting to Christianity.

Skip forward to the appropriation of land and treatment of indigenous peoples by the US government and military, with forced relocations, death marches and concentration camps that claimed every 2nd life of those displaced in the 19th century. Less deadly but psychologically equally damning were the more recent attempts to Kill the Indian in him and save the Man, which was the motto of U.S. government forcing tens of thousands of Native American children to attend “assimilation” boarding schools in the late 19th century. https://www.history.com/news/how-boarding-schools-tried-to-kill-the-indian-through-assimilation

Judicial decisions by the Supreme Court managed to weaken protections for the sedentary Pueblos wherever they could.

The United States Supreme Court, in the 1876 United States versus Joseph, declared that the Intercourse Act of 1834 was not applicable to the Pueblos of New Mexico. The Court viewed the Pueblos as having a settled, domestic existence and therefore were not subject to laws which were passed for the protection and civilization of “wild Indians.” The ruling denied the Pueblos the protection of the federal government and placed them within the jurisdiction of the local courts and officials. The Court did not define the Pueblos as citizens, and thus they did not have the right to vote, nor did they have the right to hold public office. While the Court excluded the Pueblos from participation in political life, it opened up the way for their lands to be appropriated for private enterprise by non-Indians.

https://nativeamericannetroots.net/diary/1066

In a most interesting bit, my docent added to descriptions of these politics a terse report on HUD, our Housing and Development Administration. HUD is actively building and distributing housing for descendants of the Ancestral Pueblo people. These dwellings, however, are rigidly restricted to sizes accommodating only a core family. The previously common multi-generational living situations are thus disrupted; this has the consequence that transmission of ancestral language, culture and religious practice by daily interactions with the elders is no longer happening. A sly mechanism to force acculturation, in the guise of guaranteed electricity and indoor plumbing.

I was trying to digest all this during a somewhat challenging hike at Kasha-Katuwe National Monuments (Tent Rock) within the lands of the Cochiti Pueblo. The canyon trail is a one-way trek into a narrow, “slot” canyon with a steep (630-ft) climb to the mesa top. One scraped knee and a head bursting with pride of my stamina later I enjoyed the excellent views of the Sangre de Cristo, Jemez, Sandia mountains and the Rio Grande Valley.

https://music.si.edu/video/members-cochiti-pueblo-perform-eagle-dance-2000-smithsonian-folklife-festival

And here are some interesting voices from a different pueblo.

And here are some photos taken by E. Curtis in the early 1900s in New Mexico – these are postcards, I was not allowed to photograph in the museum itself.

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Vision

“So brave you’re crazy.” That is the meaning of the last name of poet Joy Harjo, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. I chose her poem attached below (it is too long to paste, alas,) given that her vision of mapping unknown worlds is related to today’s topic.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49621/a-map-to-the-next-world

After talking about an art detective yesterday, I want to introduce an archeological sleuth today, a man who was indeed both brave and crazy. Heinrich Schliemann took old texts as a map for his archeological ventures. Old as in The Iliad. His vision was set on fire when, as a seven year-old in 1829, he saw a print of burning Troy in a history book, and later, in the green-grocer store where he clerked, heard someone reciting the Iliad in the original Greek. (It’s Germany. It’s possible…so many of us running around looking for potatoes while declaiming classical texts in the original.)

Anyhow, the guy was a bit of a self-promoter, so it is hard to tell what is truth and what is fiction. The following facts are supported, however: he survived a shipwreck near the Dutch coast and later sailed on to America. (Brave and crazy.) He made fortunes in the US Gold Rush and as a war profiteer during the Crimean War in Russia. (Neither brave nor crazy.)

Barely 36, he used his fortune to educate himself both linguistically (it is said he was fluent in more than 10 languages, crazy) and archeology (brave.) He went around the world to gather knowledge, including India, China and Japan. Long story short: he discovered the sites of Troy, Mycenae, and Tiryns by taking the Iliad’s story as a guide that was not just a literary invention.

Along the way he conveniently omitted the names of all the experts who helped him, divorced his Russian wife to marry a young Greek schoolgirl, destroyed important evidence at the archeological digs through rough and unprofessional excavations and stretched the facts whenever it helped his reputation. Let’s settle on crazy.

He did, however, rekindle enormous interest in ancient history and popularized archeology. And German kids like me certainly read wide-eyed about his discoveries when young. Until the day when we realized that he in some fashion was responsible for the introduction of one of the most reprehensible symbols in the 20th century, the swastika.

“He would go on to see the swastika everywhere, from Tibet to Paraguay to the Gold Coast of Africa. And as Schliemann’s exploits grew more famous, and archaeological discoveries became a way of creating a narrative of national identity, the swastika grew more prominent. It exploded in popularity as a symbol of good fortune, appearing on Coca-Cola products, Boy Scouts’ and Girls’ Club materials and even American military uniforms, reports the BBC. But as it rose to fame, the swastika became tied into a much more volatile movement: a wave of nationalism spreading across Germany.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/man-who-brought-swastika-germany-and-how-nazis-stole-it-180962812/#KFzGXickGsDgSmYU.99

Photographs today are of the state where he was born, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. They were taken in 2007, 18 years after the wall came down.

For music it shall be something from Mendelssohn’s Antigone. For those interested, there is a fascinating 2014 book on the Politics of Appropriation: German Romantic Music and the Ancient Greek Legacy by Jason Geary.



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