More beautiful sites, and tragic history through the times yet what stuck in my mind was “stamped ok’d by the censorship office” oh dear… must say then the UK introduced QR code stamps just recently that’s where my thoughts went, time will tell.
Par for the course in Continental Europe, and once 'normal', that is, before the advent of Modernism with its smooth (flat) walls and esp. the post-WW2 rise of brutalism (and worse).
There's but very few places without (many) damages from WW2, with Marburg an der Lahn being one of them (which was spared Allied "strategic bombing" due to its invaluable photography collection), and Kyoto, Japan, being the other. And there there's Switzerland, with, e.g., Solothurn, being an exceptionally well-preserved example (with other places not so lucky, as the Swiss were a tad envious after 1945 that their neighbours would get "new" infrastructure and started making bespoke "adjustments" to their cities…).
Seems like the “statue as decoration” trend started about the time that christianity merged with empire. Before, statues were the reason for the building-temple or otherwise-but once christian saints were included as protection and a blessing on buildings it became a necessary addition to important structures. And we now have all these magnificent examples of the combination of art and culture that grace what’s left of them. Most of them are just amazing.
That might be a good point, but I think it's also related to the abilities of artists to make human-like effigies from the (early-to-high) middle ages onwards.
Neither Judaism nor Islam do so, nor various Protestant denominations of the more 'censorious' type (e.g., Calvinism and others); the latter, though, do have this pre-Reformation tradition.
If you'll ever make it to Florence, Italy, see if the museum "Firenze com'era" (Florence How it Once Was) is open; in the 19th century, the Florentines took off most of these "pre-modern" signs and put them in a museum as they engaged in the Hausmann-like "renovation" of their city.
Very interesting. I have a collection of postcards from the early 20th century. I never thought of scanning them and making a substack from them but maybe I should. How did you scan them?
Beautiful and tragic remnants of the Austrian Empire. I understand only the first two words on the backside of postcards:
"My Dear..."
It occured to me on my 70th birthday last week that the life, not "the lives" but the life of our parents' bodies, or the breath of life that they contained, really does pass on from mother to child as the newborn takes its first breath and in this way it is my mother's sorrow at what she lost in leaving Austria as she had to, as a Jew in 1940, her longing, though she is deceased since 2012, actually does live on in me, as a peculiar love for a land, a country, that was not MY mother or fatherland, but that lives in a collective memory of some sort. These postcards are of places that were no longer part of Austria when she was born, in 1919, yet the feeling in the gut and the heart, upon seeing them via postcards within your lovely history project, remains with me. Thank you so much for these gifts - birthday gifts.
More beautiful sites, and tragic history through the times yet what stuck in my mind was “stamped ok’d by the censorship office” oh dear… must say then the UK introduced QR code stamps just recently that’s where my thoughts went, time will tell.
Oh, well, as regards the censorship stamp--I've seen them, too, 'even' on postcards sent from Canada to Austria in the early 1950s…
As to the QR stamps, well, they look ugly, and I'm unsure they are as efficient as the better looking ones from yesteryear…
Still amazed by the statues on rooftops
Par for the course in Continental Europe, and once 'normal', that is, before the advent of Modernism with its smooth (flat) walls and esp. the post-WW2 rise of brutalism (and worse).
There's but very few places without (many) damages from WW2, with Marburg an der Lahn being one of them (which was spared Allied "strategic bombing" due to its invaluable photography collection), and Kyoto, Japan, being the other. And there there's Switzerland, with, e.g., Solothurn, being an exceptionally well-preserved example (with other places not so lucky, as the Swiss were a tad envious after 1945 that their neighbours would get "new" infrastructure and started making bespoke "adjustments" to their cities…).
Seems like the “statue as decoration” trend started about the time that christianity merged with empire. Before, statues were the reason for the building-temple or otherwise-but once christian saints were included as protection and a blessing on buildings it became a necessary addition to important structures. And we now have all these magnificent examples of the combination of art and culture that grace what’s left of them. Most of them are just amazing.
That might be a good point, but I think it's also related to the abilities of artists to make human-like effigies from the (early-to-high) middle ages onwards.
Neither Judaism nor Islam do so, nor various Protestant denominations of the more 'censorious' type (e.g., Calvinism and others); the latter, though, do have this pre-Reformation tradition.
If you'll ever make it to Florence, Italy, see if the museum "Firenze com'era" (Florence How it Once Was) is open; in the 19th century, the Florentines took off most of these "pre-modern" signs and put them in a museum as they engaged in the Hausmann-like "renovation" of their city.
Very interesting. I have a collection of postcards from the early 20th century. I never thought of scanning them and making a substack from them but maybe I should. How did you scan them?
Beautiful and tragic remnants of the Austrian Empire. I understand only the first two words on the backside of postcards:
"My Dear..."
It occured to me on my 70th birthday last week that the life, not "the lives" but the life of our parents' bodies, or the breath of life that they contained, really does pass on from mother to child as the newborn takes its first breath and in this way it is my mother's sorrow at what she lost in leaving Austria as she had to, as a Jew in 1940, her longing, though she is deceased since 2012, actually does live on in me, as a peculiar love for a land, a country, that was not MY mother or fatherland, but that lives in a collective memory of some sort. These postcards are of places that were no longer part of Austria when she was born, in 1919, yet the feeling in the gut and the heart, upon seeing them via postcards within your lovely history project, remains with me. Thank you so much for these gifts - birthday gifts.