Monday 17 February 2014

Oekumenischer Pilgerweg



Last year I heard about the Ecumenical Pilgrim route through Germany. This is part of the medieval route from Poland to Santiago and recently it has been resurrected so that suitable accommodation is available, guidebooks have been published and the path marked. The reason for the name is that events in the life of the Reformation and Martin Luther happened along the route. The accommodation is an ecumenical mixture of places.

I was just kindly send these links and information:

Information from the organisers

Information from the German Compostella group

Information from Pilgern und Pilger

Information from Via Regia group

Information from WanderKompass

Outdoor guidebook

Schöne Heimat guidebook

Ich wurde gern....


Back in the saddle

The painting is almost finished and I finally have the chance to go for a walk. Bliss.

Thursday 13 February 2014

bigger than ANZAC


James Brown is a former Australian soldier who has written a book called "ANZAC's long shadow".

He has pointed out that Australia is planning to spend much more than Britain on memorials of World War 1. He thinks some of this would be better spent to help returning Austrlian soldiers today, rather than what he calls "a festival of the dead, which sometimes looks like a military Halloween."

Not unusually for his generation, he has his religious reference wrong, he means a military All Saint's Day, not the pagan festival for keeping evil spirits away.

I remember the contempt in which Anzac Day was held in the Sixties and Seventies, partly because of the Vietnam war where Australia was fighting at the time. Today the sentiment has swung in the opposite direction, too far in my opinion. I have a hunch that the biggest memorial of all the events during the centenary of the 1914-18 war will not be at the Somme, Ypres, Tannenberg, but at Gallipoli, in particular the ANZAC involvement in that campaign. I think many of the planned memorials in Britain and Europe are concerts or art exhibitions, not actually events at the sites of the battles. On the other hand, many thousands of Australians are planning to visit Gallipoli in 2015.

I think there are a number of reasons for this:


  • Australia has been de Christianised. We don't have the tradition of visiting the graves of relatives on All Saints' Day, and Good Friday has become the busiest day of fun during the Easter holidays. People crave a meaningful celebration, and the Anzac Day dawn service has become a secular memorial.
  • Countries like Britain and France have much longer histories than Australia. The Great War is significant, but it is only part of their history. However Gallipoli happened only 15 years after the creation of the nation of Australia, so it has become linked with Australian nationalism.
  • Gallipoli happened almost 100 years ago, so there is little direct emotion involved for living Australians recalling soldiers they never met. It is not as traumatic as funerals for people we know.
  • It happened on the other side of the world, which for Australians automatically gives it more significance. People in Britain and France have spent their lives travelling along the Western Front, so it is not quite as exotic.


Monday 10 February 2014

1914 - 1918


We are about to start a series of memorials of events in the so called Great War, 100 years ago.

To help with this, there is a good timeline of events on Wikipedia


This timeline starts on July 28 when Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, but of course events were already happening before this which would affect the course of the war.

For example, about 100 years ago, 2 submarines were commissioned for the Royal Australian Navy. One of these, the AE2 would soon be involved in attacks on German New Guinea, and later would be towed to the Mediterranean and take part in the naval campaign in the Dardanelles.

Another event was the completion of two Dreadnaoughts in a British shipyard, which were being bought by the Turkish navy. As the war started, Turkey made the final payment, but Britain requisitioned the ships and never handed them over (or the money back)

Turkey then bought ships from Germany instead. If Turkey had received the ships from Britain, would she have joined Britain instead of Germany in the war? Would there have been any campaign in Gallipoli? Would any Austealians have died there?




Diplomatic history


I watched the opening of the Winter Olympics at Sochi. It was an entertaining trip through history but some things were missing.
For the Russian people I have met, the 3 great invasions of their country are still important memories: Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Hitler.

None of these were mentioned in the ceremony, although the period was included, the early years of the country, Tolstoy's novel War and Peace, and workers before and after WW2.

They concentrated on socialist realist art and patriotic composers, not history.