Danube Trip – Well, We’re Here #2

Bavarian Army Museum, Ingolstadt

On Friday morning, we drove to Ingolstadt and visited the Armeemuseum. Excellent. My only slight grumbles were, firstly, that it is staffed by some ladies who do not seem to be very happy to be there, and who cheer themselves up by disciplining the visitors, and, secondly, flash photography is not allowed, and the exhibits are preserved by keeping them in such a gloomy environment that we had difficulty reading the notices on some of the displays. Other than that, the place is terrific value at 3.50 euros for an adult. Remarkable collections of weaponry and models of artillery equipment, and some breathtaking dioramas. The dioramas in particular were simply too much to take in – all done in flats, and sometimes using enhanced perspective, by which I mean that smaller scale figures are used at the back of the model.

The emphasis is, obviously, on the history of the Bavarian army, a subject area where my knowledge is very much limited to the Napoleonic period.

30YW Leather Gun

Uniforms of the Crown Prince and Genl Wrede, 1809

Genl Deroy

Abensberg

We spent the afternoon at Abensberg. The Director of the Stadtmuseum there gave me a fantastic amount of scanned material – old books on the Abensberg battles, plus some marvellous old maps from the Austrian war archives. Then he gave us an extensive guided tour of the battlefield itself. I took a lot of pictures and a lot of notes, which I shall enjoy working through, but most of the landscape-type photos are really not very suitable for including here – although the scene makes sense at the time, when explained, a photo of a tiny church tower in the far distance, obscured by woods and buildings which were not present in 1809 is pretty meaningless. It was a most enjoyable day, though – the Battle of Abensberg is one of the more confused actions of the campaign, and it makes it a lot more understandable to visit the various locations, appreciate the distances involved and see at first hand what the protagonists had to cope with.

I’ve included a selection of pictures, to give an idea of what we saw.

15mm scale model of the town of Abensberg in 1808. I don't know where I'll
store it, but I want one...

The inn at Rohr, where Archduke Charles and Napoleon spent consecutive nights

Danube Trip - Well, We're Here #1

Lindach Church

We got here safely enough yesterday. This morning we collected our rental car (it's a yellow Opel Corsa - they must have been looking for someone daft enough to take this one for a while) and headed off for the Eggmuhl battlefield. The battlefield is bigger than I expected, and our guide (Georg) gave us a few inside tales of how things are not always as they are represented. Examples:

(1) The church tower at Lindach is famous because Napoleon is reputed to have climbed up there to see where the Austrians were. In fact, he can't have, because the tower has no proper windows and you can't see anything from that position.

(2) General Cervone was hit by a cannonball, and is buried beneath a monument by the road. In fact, he is buried where he fell, on farmland, but the farmer became so fed up with visitors trampling his crops that he arranged to get the monument shifted. Thus Cervone is buried on the battlefield, but nowhere near his monument.

(3) There are many little villages on the battlefield, and the fighting lasted over two days. Exactly which bit was the battle of Eggmuhl depends on which nation's version you read and which days you include.

Whatever, it was a fascinating and rewarding morning's trip, and we are deeply grateful to Georg for his knowledge and enthusiasm.

This afternoon we wandered around Regensburg old town, and were particularly impressed by an establishment called Dampfnudel Uli's, which specialises in traditional Bavarian steam dumplings, served with custard sauce. If this does not sound particularly interesting, I assure you this is only because you have never tried them...

Tomorrow we visit the Bavarian Army Museum at Ingolstadt, and the battlefield of Abensberg. Here's some pictures from today.

Georg Schindlbeck, in the uniform of a fusilier of the Bavarian I.R. No.5, Graf
 Preysing, gives an impressive display of how to fire two aimed shots a minute with
a flintlock musket

Lend him a Bavarian helmet and a French musket, and old Max Foy can still turn
his hand to soldiering. The car is official Napoleonic army issue.

In our exchange of international gifts, Georg was kind enough to give me a musket
ball, which was found on the battlefield. It's small size suggests that it was either
an officer's pistol ball or - more likely - a Bavarian sharpshooter's rifle ball.

My valiant colleague. Simon the Bookseller on the old bridge at Regensburg. The Danube
 is absolutely raging, and there is about 4 feet clear below the top of the river walk in
the background

Inside DampfNudel Uli's - lots of photos of celebrity guests

Uli - while he was showing me some of the photos of guests, he
was delighted that I told him that, quite correctly, he was more
famous than Ronald Reagan

Danube Trip – Not a Lot of Help

As part of my preparation for my impending trip to the Danube (which starts tonight), I felt I should take advantage of the momentum and enthusiasm and revisit one of my past failures. A failure, what is more, that has nagged me like a mild toothache for years, so this is a good opportunity to sort a few things out at once.

Yet again, it has not gone well.

Around 1990, my late cousin, who was certainly one of the best-read fellows I ever knew, bought me a copy of Claudio Magris’ Danube, which, in its original Italian version, has won more literary prizes than you would believe. My cousin was a lovely, amusing man, but just occasionally he would send me an “improving” book to try to make some inroads into my vast number of years of monastic devotion to ignorance. He introduced me to Primo Levi, and a few other writers whom I have grown to love, but Magris, I fear, has been a step too far.

Now then. Claudio Magris, as you will (of course) know, is a celebrated scholar, essayist and occasional journalist who – among so many honours – is professor of modern German literature at the University of Trieste.

Claudio Magris

Danubio is a work which has received such lofty acclaim that each of my 3 or 4 failed attempts to get through it has been a humbling, not to say humiliating experience. The idea and the structure is that the reader is taken on a ramble down the Danube, from its source (and there is an interesting debate about exactly where that is) to wherever it finishes up (and I have never read anything like that far, though the Black Sea seems a decent guess). On the way, the Professor enriches the journey with snippets of history, local culture, legends and oodles of literary references. Sounds good, but each of my failed attempts has ground to a halt in the same way – bemused by the pointlessness of continually nodding, stupidly, at references that neither I, nor anyone else, is likely to make anything of.

Naturally, if Jan Baltazar Magin disagreed with the writings of Michael Bencsik back in the 18^th Century on some minor aspect of Slavophilism, there is no reason why Prof Magris should not mention it, but how much is enough? My paperback edition runs to some 400-odd pages, and I reckon there are about 10 to 12 such references per page. By any standards, that is heavy going. Who is this book aimed at? What is the reader supposed to do with all this stuff? Take notes? Agree? Check the references? Be impressed? Be convinced? Weep?

I suspect that Magris wrote the book for himself – and God bless him, he is entitled to do just that. The book is very fine – it may even be perfect, I am obviously not qualified to judge. I suspect that any readers who are not actually part of a tiny, closed circle of specialists in the field of Central European literature are purely incidental, and that the circle itself was expected to do exactly what they did – applaud and award prizes.

What is infuriating is the sycophantic noise that surrounds it. If there is anything more wretched than people who make a living out of criticizing literature then I cannot think of it offhand. Well, maybe my own failure to understand some literature runs it pretty close.

I take a random example from the gushy tributes at the start of the book.

Magris writes beautifully (and is beautifully translated by Patrick Creagh); he seems to have read everything. His reading has not made him clever, but wise. On almost every page there are passages that make the heart lift.

John Banville

There you go, you see. He seems to have read everything. Books like this are deliberately intimidating. They are consciously aimed above criticism, because the sort of people who perform literary criticism will be terrified to admit  that they didn’t have a bloody clue what he was on about. All those references – does Banville (for example) have the slightest idea about whether they are genuine, or relevant, or even accurately transcribed and interpreted? Of course he doesn’t. He just wishes, like all the other pseuds who have contributed eulogies, that he himself could have written something so obviously, exquisitely, chokingly learned.

I don’t hold these views lightly. I find inverted snobbery in any form extremely distasteful. There is nothing smart about being dumb. So I have kept going back to Danube, with growing pessimism, in the hope that it would grow on me – and it is, indisputably, finely written, and it contains much that is enjoyable and enlightening. However, I always come back to this problem with the sheer number and density of  references. It is irritating. It gets in the way. I get annoyed. Why has academic writing evolved in this form? I don’t believe that the great pioneers of modern thought behaved in this way, why do modern academics have to hide behind other people’s work in this strange manner?

Not to worry. In a moment of thinking that surely it couldn’t just be me, I looked at the Amazon customer reviews for Danube – no higher plane of intellectual activity exists, as we know. As expected, there were a number of very positive offerings from people who must have had as little idea as I do. In there, however, was the following, which I reproduce in full entirely because I thought it was somehow a blessed relief – something that needed saying.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars

Utterly pretentious 9 Jan 2010

By Hoopdriver

Format:Paperback

The snobbery and name dropping in this book beggars belief. I actually thought it was a send-up at first but as the pages dragged (and I do mean dragged) by it became horribly clear that the cold intellectual snob who wrote this thing is every bit as arrogant and donnish as he appears. I've truly never seen or read anything like it. It is convoluted, full of itself, and lacks any coherent narrative form but seems to wander from one idle whimsy to another, thick with the names of obscure figures in European academe, with the smug and donnish author keeping one eye on the mirror all the while. Its biggest failing is its complete lack of heart or soul or passion for his topic - one of the grandest and most beautiful rivers in Europe. It is not a travel book, or a history; it is purely an exercise in cold remorseless intellectualism, with no regard for either the reader or the river. And yes, I know, I've seen the other five-star reviewers and read their pooh-pooh-ing of those of us garlic-and-onions Philistines who do not appreciate the erudite wit and wisdom of this writer. To them I can say only that a true genius is one who can communicate his (or her!) passions and ideas, speak to every level, and generate enthusiasm in their listeners or readers. This fails abysmally. If one wants to read a brilliant - and erudite - book about the Danube one needs go no further than Patrick Leigh Fermor's travelogue of his journey along the Danube in 1933. And when you read him and compare those truly brilliant and warm and readable books with this bit of pretentious drivel, you will se the difference within a very few pages, and not give this thing a second glance.

Yes, it’s harsh, and I don’t agree with a lot of what it says, but it is, at last, a small riposte on behalf of what appears to me to be commonsense. I shall, needless to say, take my copy of Danube with me on my trip. You never know, God may suddenly lay his hand on me and render me able to understand it. Apart from that, some complete stranger may see me reading it on the plane, and be impressed.

Now you’re talking.

Hooptedoodle #99 – Queen G and the Average Sickness Scheme

Simply because I was thinking about her this morning, and chortling gently as I shaved (chortling whilst shaving is OK – a full guffaw is not recommended), here is another time-wasting tale about someone I worked with in a previous life. It is certainly true that we are affected and informed by the characters we meet in the workplace, and I often wonder if there was some strange plan behind the crew that my former employers wheeled in – these were not everyday people. At least I hope not.

Gwendoline, or “G”, as she liked to be known, was a treasure, yet also an enigma. She did have a degree in something or other, but no-one knew what it was, and one of her more famous unpublished accomplishments was an all-time company record for the lowest score in the IBM programmers’ aptitude test. So not a programmer then.

She was born in India, daughter of a senior officer in the British army, and was sent to a Very Famous Ladies’ Boarding School in Buckinghamshire, where she was taught Elocution, Deportment, Cricket, Advanced Etiquette and How to Be Kind to One’s Inferiors without Appearing Patronising. She may not have passed in this last subject, but she would certainly have tried.

Jolly hockey sticks

G was a natural for any sort of committee role, and was such wonderful value in the coffee lounge after lunch that she was always surrounded by an enthusiastic, often hysterical coterie. If anyone wanted a totally unenlightened view from the 19^th Century on any subject, G was your girl. Of course, we used to wind her up mercilessly. For my part, I used to affect a heavy, Ringo Starr-type Scouse accent, and get things badly wrong, and Good Old G – straight out of the Schoolgirl’s Own Annual of 1927 – would kindly and supportively put me straight, rising above my obvious disadvantages with admirable courage. I confess that some of my efforts were scripted by my friends. Example:

Me (staring out of window, coffee cup stopped in mid air): “God – eh – look at dat rain. It’s like dem Nigeria Falls…”

G (only slightly dismayed): “Oh no, Tony – I think you probably mean the NIAGARA Falls. Niagara is in America – Nigeria, as I am sure you are aware, is in Africa.”

Me (ignoring kicks under table and colleagues suffering from coughing fits – because I had just won a couple of 10 pence side-bets): “Oh – righto, G – tanks, G. But what’s dem big waterfalls that Queen Victoria discovered?”

G: “That must be the Victoria Falls, Tony. I don’t think she discovered them herself. I think she sent David Livingstone to discover them on her behalf.”

You can see how this stuff would brighten the average lunch hour.

I always saw her as Florence Nightingale. Actually, that’s not exactly true – whenever I read or hear any reference to The Lady with the Lamp, I still see G before me. There was a long period during which we all sought to find something she could actually do. For a while she did general administration things, such as meeting job interviewees at the front door (they were always impressed) and, ironically, invigilating the programmers’ aptitude tests in which she herself had set such a benchmark.

Later they made her PA to the head of Operations, but that had to stop because the computer shift leaders used to tell her things which patently were not true, and (whisper it) her attitude to her boss was coloured by a fair measure of unrequited and totally unilateral lust, and she took to ringing him on work matters during the evenings.

The undoubted high spot of her career came when our company built a prestigious new office block, and arranged for it to be officially opened by HM the Queen. There were extensive rehearsals for this, and someone – by a stroke of pure genius – cast G in the role of the Queen for the rehearsals. She was wonderful – literally majestic. Imperious. It was the moment for which she had been born. In fact, there were those who said that Her Actual Majesty on the real day was a bit of a disappointment by comparison.

Eventually she was appointed to the chair of the Staff Association. This is certainly a measure of how little interest the company had in the staff. We had no trades union representation (thank goodness, probably), and having a complete airhead chairing the thing would ensure that no staff matters ever got beyond endless, pointless discussion. G threw herself into the role with great enthusiasm and, of course, no talent. And, it has to be said, with a British Empire view of the rights of workers which made her a most willing pawn on the side of the management. A sad fate for one who had once almost been a queen.

At one time there was some concern over levels of absenteeism. One winter there was a flu epidemic, and the Staff Association were handed the challenge of coming up with a way of cutting down on sickness-related absences. Clearly, if the SA themselves came up with a scheme, the staff could not complain about it. G came up with a terrific idea. For each division of the company, she said, we should work out the average number of days sickness per year per staff member. Anyone who exceeded that number in a particular year would be required to take the excess as holidays. That would drive down the sickness levels.

A couple of us who remembered her fondly and wished to avoid her being assassinated tried to coach her on why this was a disastrous scheme. Quite apart from ethical and human rights and legal considerations, the shortfall in G’s mathematical skills stuck out like a sore thumb. If the scheme went ahead as devised, we told her, no-one would have more than the average number of days sickness from last year. Thus this year’s average would be smaller, and so on. We did not know how long it would take, but eventually the average number of days sickness would be tending to zero. G was so pleased with her idea that she ignored all guidance, and the plan was submitted in her original form. Happily it was not adopted, but her remaining credibility took a severe knock.

She is retired now. I’m sure she is still opening garden parties and batting heroically for a ladies’ cricket team, and living entirely in the past. The Lady with the Lamp – hmmm.

Hooptedoodle #98 - Steve Topping

As another gentle sign-off for the Summer, here’s a whimsical little clip of the reclusive, little known and seriously underrated English guitarist Steve Topping, of whom I am a fan. It’s pretty, laid back to the point of extinction and almost drowned out by the background noises, which seems to be not untypical of the man, somehow.

Topping is best known for having briefly played with Level 42 around 1988, but (allegedly) he very quickly fell out with Mark King and was replaced by Alan Murphy. On the face of it, as a guitarist’s career move, this is right up there with Oscar Moore leaving the Nat Cole Trio in 1947 to pursue a solo career.

Steve is still around, and his last album project was a beauty.

Hooptedoodle #97 - Never Seen One Like That Before

As a result of my intensive spell of battle board painting, enlivened by the odd self-inflicted setback, I haven't been outside much for a day or two. Today we have a storm warning for tonight, so I am thinking seriously about getting the garden furniture stored out of harm's way, especially our rather world-weary ombrellone. Putting the furniture away brings thoughts of the approaching end of what has been a remarkably fine Summer, but it seems that it has decided that it isn't going to go without a struggle, and today is absolutely lovely again.

A number of things have surpassed themselves this year - the white lilac, the edelweiss, the dandelions(!) and the wasps come to mind, but the most spectacular shows have come late in the season. The butterflies are the best I've ever seen here, and the berries on the whitebeam trees in the wood are fantastic.

Normally, the whitebeam berries are fairly feeble, and are rapidly scoffed by the pigeons, who seem to get some form of serious indigestion from them, to the detriment of any vehicles parked in the driveway. This year the berries are sufficient to ridicule the efforts of mere pigeons - I thought I should take a picture or two, in case I can't remember this, come February.

Buddleia Davidii well past its best, but the Peacock butterflies are
still very grateful, thank you

Just a Scottish garden, but by our standards this really is something a bit unusual.