The chronicle of the monk Herbert of Reichenau for the year 1021 ends “My brother Werner was born on November 1.“
1021 was not an uneventful year. The emperor began a campaign into Italy. Illustrious abbots died. There was an earthquake. But Herbert took the time to note, at the end of the year, that his brother was born.
Of such acts of tenderness is history made.
This post broke through the shell of crustiness on my medievalist heart and made me go ‘aww’.
There was a medieval parenting manual that recommended parents smack pieces of furniture their toddlers bumped into and scold the furniture for being so naughty as to get in the way, so that the kids would laugh and forget about their bumps and bruises
I read that and my heart melted
(source: Medieval Women by Deirdre Jackson. She cited the primary source but I cannot for the life of me find the book to check what it was called)
We should hold a thousandth birthday party for Werner in a couple of years.
Recently I was made aware of the existence of Friedrich Kellner. He was a man living in Nazi Germany who wrote an opposition to Mein Kampf, in secret for obvious reasons, and detailed the Nazi crimes he witnessed so that people would know about them in the future.
What Kellner did was to take extracts from the press, stick them in his book and comment on them at length from his own point of view.
Which is what the whole world does now on Twitter and on blogs. I guess Kellner was ahead of his time in more than one way.
There’s surprisingly little written about him considering how remarkable his story is. He very much put himself in the firing line.
In 1925, according to a biographical essay written by his grandson, Kellner received a copy of Adolf Hitler’s newly published Mein Kampf, along with the encouragement to “take a stand against its author.” Speaking at rallies, Kellner would hold up the copy of Hitler’s book and declare, “Gutenberg, your printing press has been violated by this evil book!” His public criticism of Nazism earned him unfriendly attention from the SA, but having lived through the trenches, he was accustomed to violence and not easily intimidated. – source
Eventually he was told he and his wife Paulina (who completely stood by him) would be sent to a concentration camp if they continued to criticize the Nazi regime. That didn’t stop Kellner though, he just continued to do it in secret. He wrote in his book,
“I could not fight the Nazis in the present, as they had the power to still my voice, so I decided to fight them in the future. I would give the coming generations a weapon against any resurgence of such evil.”
My list of Historical Figures Who Should Get Movies is incredibly long, but Kellner is very close to the top because his story has a LOT of reasonance today. And not just because he was basically a blogger.
I wish I could have met Friedrich Kellner. I think we would have gotten along.
I’ve been on a bit of a Titanic kick recently. I screencapped the movie and I remembered how utterly sad and fascinating I find that story.
I know the film gets a lot of flack but the performances! God the performances are so good. Kate Winslet says so much with just her eyes, see shots 3 and 4 for example. Also Jonathan Hyde’s acting as J. Bruce Ismay is so very underrated. The scene where he escapes the ship, ahead of people who deserved it more… oh man. That’s one of my favourite parts of the movie.
Also how great is the fading transition which makes Jack and Rose into ghosts on the decaying ship?
But I think my favourite shot in Titanic is the first one in this set, of Jack and Cal and the unnamed father standing over the lifeboat. Jack and Cal never existed, but that guy – based on what he says to his daughters in that scene, he would appear to be Benjamin Hart. Who did very much exist, and died on the ship that night.
