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Being as different a king as he was, Ludwig II had few friends inside his own government. In particular, the ministers of the realm, whom he had inherited from his father, were seriously offended by his behavior and his refusal to pay attention to them. Although he had paid for his pet projects out of his own funds, by 1885, the King was 14 million marks in debt, had borrowed heavily from his family, and rather than economizing as his financial ministers advised, Ludwig continued to pursue his further opulent designs without pause; besides the four castles he had already begun, he had four more on the drawing board. He demanded that loans be sought from all of Europe’s royalty, while still remaining aloof from the matters of state. Feeling harassed and irritated by his ministers, he let it be known that he was considering replacing them all. The ministers feared that he would actually do it, so they decided to find a way to declare the King mentally ill, which would render him unable to rule. Between January and March of 1886, when Ludwig had ruled Bavaria for twenty-one years and was only forty years of age, the conspirators assembled a “medical report” that included a litany of supposed bizarre behaviors: his pathological shyness, his avoidance of state business, his complex and expensive flights of fancy, sloppy and childish table manners, and sending servants into foreign lands on “research trips” to verify architectural details of buildings. The report was finalized in June and signed by four psychiatrists, the main one being Dr. Bernhard von Gudden, the head of the Munich insane asylum. The report concluded that the King suffered from paranoia and was incapable of ruling. Interestingly, three of the signers had never met the King, while Gudden had met him only once, twelve years before. There was no examination. Ludwig’s uncle, Prince Luitpold, kindly let it be known that he would take over the government if the King were to be deposed. At four in the morning on June 10, 1886, a government commission arrived at Neuschwanstein to deliver a document of deposition to the King. Having been warned an hour earlier, Ludwig had them arrested at the gates and imprisoned until later that day. In spite of the King not being officially deposed, the government issued a news release declaring Luitpold as Prince Regent, which made him the ruler of Bavaria. King Ludwig protested with his own news release, but most of the copies were seized by the commission and the populace remained ignorant of the happenings. On June 12, the commission succeeded in capturing the now non-king Ludwig, taking him to the Castle Berg for confinement. That evening, on a private walk around the castle’s lake with Dr. von Gudden, Ludwig and his psychiatrist both disappeared. Their bodies were found the next morning in waist-deep water. Ludwig’s death was officially ruled a suicide by drowning, despite an official autopsy indicating that no water was found in his lungs. Gudden’s body showed blows to the head and neck, with signs that he had been strangled. Ludwig was officially succeeded by his younger brother Otto, but since Otto had been ruled insane three years before (by Dr. von Gudden), Prince Regent Luitpold continued to rule until his death in 1912, at age 91. His eldest son, also named Ludwig, took over, officially deposed Otto, and declared himself King Ludwig III of Bavaria. He would rule only until 1918, when the end of World War I declared that Germany would no longer have monarchies. Prince Regent Luitpold, needing money to finish the castle, began charging visitors to see Castle Neuschwanstein in August of 1886. Since that time, more than 50 million people have walked through the halls, becoming one of Bavaria’s biggest tourist attractions. Peter Kollwitz was not of full age in August 1914 when he wished to join the German army. As such, he needed permission from his father to be a military volunteer, but his father refused. His mother, Kathe, persuaded her husband to change his mind and permission was granted. So, when Peter was killed ten days after leaving his home town of Berlin in October, there was not only grief, but also guilt. By 1914, Kathe Kollwitz had already established herself as a great German artist through her production of prints, lithographs, etchings, and woodcuts, as well as sculptures. Having been born in 1867 Prussia to socially radical parents and an equally radical Lutheran priest for a grandfather, she was from childhood consumed by issues of social justice. When she married a doctor who worked solely among the poor in 1890s Berlin, she became deeply involved with the lives and hardships of the working-class people among whom she was living, and above all, with the role and responsibilities of women. Peter’s death became a turning point. “There is in our lives a wound,” she wrote, “which will never heal, nor should it.” She would try to express her grief and guilt about her son through her different mediums for the rest of her life. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, many of Kathe’s posters, exhibits, displays, sculptures, and carvings were reflections of the war and its effect on people, society, and social concerns. She publicly opposed the rise of Hitler and, along with Einstein and other intellectuals and artists, encouraged voters to reject the Nazis in the 1932 election. Unsurprisingly, once they came to power, the Nazis banned her from exhibiting and forced her to resign from the Academy of Arts, where she taught. In 1935 she produced her last cycle of prints—eight lithographs called simply Death. They portrayed individuals, including herself, in deep sorrow, grief, and despondency for the condition of their lives, transformed and diminished by war and oppression. This was hardly welcome to the Nazi regime, as it claimed to be the rebirth of a cleansed and pure nation. She was visited by the Gestapo, who threatened her with a concentration camp; her international profile left her in relative freedom. The Second World War delivered a final blow: the death of her grandson on the Eastern Front in 1942 followed by her evacuation from Berlin the following year. She died in the last weeks of the war, in April, 1945. In an entry in her diary dated October 22, 1937, the anniversary of Peter’s death, she wrote about a small sculpture she had been working on, a sculpture meant to be a private memorial for her son and herself together. It showed a mother, seated, holding her dead son lying between her knees, in her lap. Although the form derives from religious imagery, there is nothing Christian about this sculpture. The son is not, like Jesus, presented to the viewer for contemplation or adoration. He is not resting, as in Michelangelo’s Pieta, on her knees, but is huddled between her legs, almost totally enclosed. She does not show him to us, but attempts to shield him, although dead, from further harm. There is no hint of salvation, merely a response to slaughter. On November 14, 1993, in the pouring rain, the President of Germany, Richard von Weizacker, came to the Neue Wache [New Guardhouse] building in Berlin to rededicate it as the National Memorial to the Victims of War and Dictatorship. It is a building with one display room with a plain slate floor and walls of stone under an oculus in the ceiling that is open to the wind, rain, and snow, as well as the sun. In the middle of the otherwise undecorated and unadorned room, was placed a larger version of the sculpture created in 1937 by Kathe Kollwitz, herself both a witness and victim. Ruth Padel, a poet, said this about the sculpture: “So there it stands, light versus dark. It is in the open air, the light comes down and it is surrounded by empty walls. It sums up the suffering of everybody in all wars. If this were found in a Neolithic tomb, it would still be relevant, because it is about a grown-up mourning a child. It was a kind of political genius of [Helmut Kohl, Chancellor of Germany, who chose the sculpture] to see that this would stand when other things fall away. There is no contextualizing, with any particular clothing or prop. There is just the little face of the dead child, turning up to the mother, the mother’s hand over his face but yet looking at the child, helpless. It is the embodiment of grief and loss.” I took this picture in October of last year. I had read about this memorial, but had not expected to find the sculpture. I discovered it only three blocks from my hotel. Many of the words above come from Germany, Memories of a Nation, by Neil MacGregor. When I was writing Teddy’s War, I developed the authenticity of the story by using a slew of books that I had already or bought along the way. My bookcase currently holds about seventy books related to World War II, most of them nonfiction. I’m not sure how many new books I bought during my writing time, but I would guess around thirty. And I’m still buying; I’m just that interested. I found most of the books by browsing the books listed in Amazon.com. I’d type in the subject and see what came up. There was always something that seemed interesting, but it wasn’t likely that I was finding the “best” books on the subjects. I enjoy looking at Amazon Choice books, recommended books, the “readers who chose this book also looked at these books”, “books similar to what you asked for”, or other marketing devices that Amazon has on their website that give priority to the books they want me to buy. I have discovered a better way. A month or so ago, I was contacted by Dan Shepherd. He is the head of a small group of people who launched a new author site in the Spring. Dan asked me to provide him a blurb on Teddy’s War, and then recommend five more books that provided material associated with it. I looked at their webpage, liked it, filled out some templates that he provided, and then gave him my blurb about the book and my list of five associated books. Dan’s group edited my words a little, but basically accepted what I had written. They adjusted everything for their website’s format. This is the result: https://shepherd.com/best-books/what-our-fathers-never-told-us-about-wwii I created the “topic”, chose five books I had used while writing the novel that fit the topic, and then wrote less than 110 words of why the book was significant to me. I had to swear that I’d read them all and was making honest comments. What you see in my presentation is similar to the presentations throughout the website. It provides selections of books that have been read by and then recommended by authors writing in the field. The website provides several searchable topics that can focus what the reader is looking for. That seems more interesting and infinitely more profitable than randomly browsing Amazon. At the end of September, I’m heading to Poland and Germany for a tour. I’ll be gone for almost three weeks. It is a tour hosted by Globus and has a World War Two focus. I’m visiting these major cities: Warsaw, Krakow, Wroclaw, Dresden, Berlin, Weimar, Nuremberg, and Munich. Along the way, I’ll see the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, the Auschwitz/Birkenau concentration and termination camps; Oskar Schindler’s factory; Buchenwald concentration camp, the Nuremberg Trials courtroom, the Dachau Memorial Site, and Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. I’m staying an extra couple of days in Munich to research a few nearby sites that might have been seen by my dad. He was in the area during October, 1945. I’ll take a lot of pictures so you can look forward to being inundated when I get back. The photo shows a table top that I made for one of my sons. Prefabricated metal legs are coming in the next couple of days. The wood pieces embedded in the resin are from a local Sequoia tree that was struck by lightning several years ago. I salvaged the trunk when it was cut down. A sawmill in Santa Fe cut the trunk into about twenty slabs, and this table uses the very last one. Once the legs are here, I’ll get them attached and then be off to San Diego to deliver the table, eat out, and walk on the beach. Next on my schedule is a trip to Houston to help another son remodel a laundry room. Finishing that, I’ll be back home to help replace 200 cedar pickets on an aging fence. I also have a new granddaughter due in July, so I’m helping my third son work on his house and yard to improve his homestead while he still has the time. Once I get done with other people, I’m enclosing my back deck so I can do larger wood projects; building the table top convinced me that I needed more room. The deck already has a roof, so I have only to build walls and put in a door. The third weekend of May, I’m the featured Children’s Book Author at a local bookstore for a book talk and signing. I did return to reading the history of Eastern Europe, but decided to scale back my focus. It’s too confusing to read the history of two dozen or so countries over a few thousand years, especially when every kingdom and province in the European world invaded the eastern countries at a pace of every hundred years or so. When you throw in the big invaders – the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians, the Celts, the Vikings, the Turks, and the Mongols – and then add the religious wars, the Crusades, the Ottomans, and all the family dynasties (like the Habsburgs and Romanovs), it’s really hard to follow. I gave up and bought another Bill Bryson book - A Short History of Nearly Everything. It’s already a lot more fun to read (it’s a science book, by the way). Meanwhile, I’m back to thinking about my eleventh Mogi book. That might be a more enjoyable summer project and I’ll read about Poland and Germany the week before I go on my trip. I think I’m suffering from history overload, so I’ll not be writing blogs for a while. I promised myself when I started blogging that I wouldn’t write blogs when I had nothing to say, so I’m going to use the time off to recharge my interests and rebuild my backlog of people, places and incidents that I think are interesting. Art Spiegelman is a real-life graphic artist and illustrator who has founded, edited, and drawn avant-garde comics and magazines. He began researching a major project in the 1980s, deciding eventually on an intimate view of what happened to his Jewish parents in wartime Poland. The book he created, MAUS, Volumes I and II, covers his father’s life from a young man; his courtship and marriage to his mother, Anja; their hiding from the Nazis during the invasion of Poland; their capture and subsequent years of imprisonment at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp; and then into their later years. Art inserts himself into the story as the son of Vladek, and who is a graphics artist looking for fulfilment in creating a graphic novel of WWII. He needs the experience and activities of his father, but Vladek continually gets off track, making it difficult. Slowly but surely, Art draws out his parents’ history, while struggling to deal with his father as Vladek grows older, more self-centered, and more intolerable. What Art wants to do in his own life butts up against his responsibility for providing for his father (the current wife leaves Vladek because of his growing paranoia). Eventually, the reader experiences both stories: Vladek’s Holocaust experience and Art’s coming to grips with his own life with and without his father. MAUS is a graphic novel, which means that it has comic-book-type panels of drawings featuring cartoon-type characters in a physical context. Dialogue occurs in word balloons, while narration occurs across the top or bottom of the panel, or between panels. The highly detailed illustrations reveal far more than the dialogue. It is the perfect “showing” of the story rather than the “telling” of the story, and the reader sees far more in the pictures than the words say. Looking for a unique venue to convey the tragedy of the individuals, Spiegelman uses humans with mouse heads to portray Polish Jews, with pig heads for Polish non-Jews, with cat heads for Germans, and with dog heads for American soldiers. Don’t think this is a childish indulgence; his framework becomes surprisingly important and comfortable, while it enhances the identities of the different groups. Spiegelman’s artwork is superb and is amazingly effective in keeping the reader in the context of what’s going on, and what’s happening to who. I didn’t know that animal faces could convey such drama and emotion. MAUS is no comic book. There’s not a single KA-POW, SHAZAM, or Super Hero to be found. It has sections and chapters; it uses present time as well as flashbacks to tell the past; it allows the reader to hear the author’s thoughts; there’s a wide number of characters that give depth, understanding, and personality to the themes; the book covers a number of years, in a number of locales; and the story-line, though complex, is easy to grasp and pulls the reader along. The book is very novel-ish with regard to having themes that weave in and out as they resolve: the story of Art’s father and mother’s experiences of being Jews in war-time Poland, the present-day predicament of the author regarding his father, the overall portrayal of inmates living in Nazi death camp environments, and the elements of an enduring love story. It is also a personal book, the author absorbing his father’s past life while dealing honestly with the impact of his father’s present life on his own. Art is very open about his feelings. Congruent with what I’ve read, MAUS is as authentic to its wartime subject matter as you can get. I couldn’t verify the novel’s stories being the actual history of Art Spiegelman’s family, but I can tell you that it is spot-on with its description of the horrors of Nazi Poland. It is not a children’s book. Young readers will not be irreparably harmed by it, but it is raw when it comes to portraying institutional hate, incredible cruelty, disrespected and marginalized humanity, unimaginable circumstances, and other descriptors typically reserved for the Holocaust, the Nazis, and wholesale genocide. Kids can read it, but I hope they don’t. At the same time, I hope that young adults and adults read it and believe every word. It is an incredible combination of history and literature. There is a time and place for growing up and accepting reality, and I appreciate parental concerns with wanting to control that time and place. It’s a shame that “banning” a book serves as the only way to exert influence and control on public school literature, but it is a greater shame that there are those who are willing to sacrifice the innocence of childhood to propagate their own agendas. Not reading the book is a lost opportunity to see a real-time, personal episode of history and then to see the consequences of that history on the future of those involved. MAUS, the Holocaust, the unbelievable cruelty of war, and the cost of totalitarianism is now more pertinent to our perception of the world than ever before. |
AuthorDon Willerton has been a reader all his life and yearns to write words like the authors he has read. He's working hard at it and invites others to share their experiences. |