Thanks to the sterling efforts of colleagues in Collections and Academic Liaison (CAL), a hitherto underutilised section of the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) library has recently been catalogued. 2252 titles running to almost 79 metres of shelving under the ‘Foreign colonies’ classification have now been added to iDiscover. Previously these titles were only discoverable through a labyrinthine card catalogue situated in the Rare Books Reading Room at Cambridge University Library; potential users had to know of the existence of this collection and had to physically visit the UL to access the card catalogue.
Continue reading “Cataloguing of the Royal Commonwealth Society Library’s ‘Foreign colonies’ section”Category: German
The mystery of the Pied Piper
I wrote earlier about Till Eulenspiegel, a figure of German folklore who may have been real or fictional. In this post I will look at another legendary German character with similarly mysterious origins, the Pied Piper of Hamelin, made well known to German and English speakers by many different retellings of the story.
Scholars generally believe that the legend is based on a real historical event which occurred on June 26th, 1284 when a man with a pipe led 130 children away from the town of Hamelin (in German, Hameln) in north Germany. The first known evidence of this was a stained glass window depicting the Pied Piper and the children, erected in the town church around 1300. This was unfortunately destroyed in the 17th century but was written about several times and copied in the late 16th century. Early texts made no mention of rats but over time the story developed into one in which the piper (wearing pied – or colourful – clothes) successfully rid the town of an abundance of rats but led the children away as revenge when the townspeople refused to pay him. The German name for the character, Der Rattenfänger von Hameln, references this aspect. Continue reading “The mystery of the Pied Piper”
Albrecht Altdorfer: bringing landscape to the fore
February 12 marks the anniversary of the death of Albrecht Altdorfer (1480-1538), little known today but an artist who lived at the same time as the much better known Albrecht Dürer (subject of an earlier blog post here) in Regensburg on the river Danube, just 60 miles from Dürer’s native Nuremberg. I only became aware of him in autumn 2023 when I saw an impressively detailed etching in the Graves Gallery in Sheffield with the caption “one of the first to take an interest in landscape as an independent subject”, i.e. treating the landscape as the subject of the work rather than just a background. The etching on display was of a large spruce; the same etching, in a version with watercolour, appears on the front cover of a book devoted to an exploration of Altdorfer’s landscape works: Albrecht Altdorfer and the origins of landscape by Christopher S. Wood (2014 2nd ed., 405:82.c.201.3). Continue reading “Albrecht Altdorfer: bringing landscape to the fore”
The reverse Grand Tour: women travelling to Britain
Back in the pandemic summer of 2020 I wrote about the Grand Tour experiences of various women who travelled to mainland Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. In this post I will look at the writings of some women who came to Britain from abroad around the same time, sharing some of their thoughts and impressions.
First is Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807), an important figure of the German Enlightenment, credited with being the first female novelist in Germany with her 1771 work Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim which was published by Christoph Martin Wieland, a cousin to whom she had previously been briefly engaged. She was also the grandmother of Bettina von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, siblings who were famous Romantic writers. By the 1780s, already in her 50s, La Roche’s youngest child had left home and she was able to travel more easily, first in 1784 to Switzerland, then to France in 1785 before a trip to the Netherlands and England (London and its environs) in 1786 which she wrote about in Tagebuch einer Reise durch Holland und England. Quotes below are taken from an English version of this: Sophie in London 1786 translated from the German by Clare Williams (484.d.93.3). Continue reading “The reverse Grand Tour: women travelling to Britain”
Till Eulenspiegel through the ages
In Britain the character of Robin Hood is a well-known folklore figure. An equivalent figure in Germany might be Till Eulenspiegel, perhaps best known here from Richard Strauss’s tone poem Till Eulenspiegel’s merry pranks. As with Robin Hood there is fascination around the question of whether he is a fictional character or a real historical person. What we do know is that the earliest version of the Till Eulenspiegel story was published in the early 16th century in German, and this was followed by many editions and translations (see Further reading below for some facsimile editions of early works). The story has continued to be a popular one and this post will feature some different illustrated versions in our collections.
Till is often depicted with an owl and a mirror (as the name literally means owl-mirror). Here are a few more examples (click on each one to see enlarged version):
Title page of Nn.30.60
Cover of Waddleton.d.1.65
Title page of Waddleton.d.20.1
Cover of Waddleton.b.1.459
Heinrich Zille: observing Berlin life
Several years ago I found an amusing greetings card to give for an anniversary and was particularly pleased to see that it was by a German artist, Heinrich Zille (1858-1929), taken from the cover of his book Rund um’s Freibad. My interest in Zille deepened during a visit to Berlin when I discovered a museum dedicated to him. There was a large element of humour in his work, and as it is some time since our blog post dedicated to German humour, now feels like a good time to revisit this theme, looking at relevant works in the UL’s collections. Zille was a keen observer of the harsh realities of everyday life as well, so this post will also cover this more serious side to his work, shown in both his art and photography. Continue reading “Heinrich Zille: observing Berlin life”
Funding opportunity for a PhD on German author Stefan Heym: the UL’s Stefan Heym Archive
Cambridge University Library is delighted to have received an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) and invites applications for PhD studentships, starting in October 2024. The successful PhD candidate will receive funding to work on the Stefan Heym Archive, as part of the Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) with the University of Oxford. Continue reading “Funding opportunity for a PhD on German author Stefan Heym: the UL’s Stefan Heym Archive “
The long, varied and problematic life of Leni Riefenstahl
It is twenty years since Leni Riefenstahl died in September 2003 at the age of 101. She is best known as a Nazi film director but as the large illustrated biography Leni Riefenstahl: five lives (S415.a.200.1) indicates, there were other aspects of her life – dancer and actress before 1933, and photographer and diver after 1945 – and these, rather than her work in the Third Reich, will be the focus of this blog post.
As a young woman dancing was her passion despite her father’s discouragement. She began to make a career of it but suffered injuries which led to her turning to acting instead. In this respect there are parallels to be drawn with the very slightly older 
Marlene Dietrich who became an actress after her career as a violinist was cut short by tendonitis. The two women’s lives are contrasted in the recent Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a century in two lives by Karin Wieland (415:3.c.201.1579; the original German version is at 571:73.c.201.5). Continue reading “The long, varied and problematic life of Leni Riefenstahl”
Edgar Reitz – VariaVision
Last year the film director Edgar Reitz celebrated his 90th birthday. He is best known for his series Heimat which charts the lives of a family in the Hunsrück region of Germany throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. To mark his 90th birthday the autobiography Filmzeit, Lebenszeit (C219.c.2371) was published in October 2022 in which Reitz offers us a detailed insight into his development as a film director. I was particularly interested in the chapters covering his early career as I had recently cataloged a brochure (CCA.60.792) documenting the fascinating multi-media project “VariaVision” from 1965. This brochure is part of the library of Walter Schobert, former director of the Filmmuseum Frankfurt, which the University Library received as a donation and is a unique resource for film studies. Continue reading “Edgar Reitz – VariaVision “
Other sides to Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque, most known for writing the best-selling novel Im Westen nichts Neues (All quiet on the western front) was born 125 years ago in June 1898. His most famous work has come to our attention again recently because of the new award-winning film version released last year. When the book first came out in 1929 you might imagine that people had had enough of reading about war but Remarque’s raw and honest anti-war stance led to the book becoming a worldwide literary sensation with one million copies sold in the first year in Germany alone. Four years later in May 1933 it was among the books publicly burned by students in Berlin.
Much has been written about Remarque’s literary work but this blog post will focus on less well-known aspects of the man – his art collecting and relationships with interesting women – as evidenced by books in our collections. Continue reading “Other sides to Erich Maria Remarque”
Languages across Borders 