JF Ptak Science Books

What Things Used to Look Like: Candy Stores (not "shops"), 1942.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 302

Well now--this is a candy shop

It is positively dripping with evil,  its luscious display  in a soft pre-chewed-like environment, as in a chocolate dream in someone else's head.  (Chocolate dreams are good to have, just ask poor old dead Hans Sloane, the man whose chocolate-based fortune and bequest formed the basis of the British Museum.)  The ribbon design in the floor continuing up the wall just past the display is an invitation to getting totally lost in sugarly beauty, a swirling trail to a confectionary Ravena.

All of these images come from the pamphlet published by the Associated Retail Confectioners of the United States:  Meet the Foods Candy is Made Of, made to accompany their annual meeting of 1946 at the Drake Hotel in Chicago.  (There must've been an awful lot of these folks to book the Drake.)  The cover does seem somewhat on the desperate side, trying to convince anyone who would have a look that candy--since it is made of all that good looking stuff--was indeed FOOD ("no wonder candy is so good to eat!")

The next image is the "Table Service" area of Wieda's Incoporated, (a fine, large candy store in Patterson, New Jersey) , "located in the rear", where I guess the serious stuff is done, when you needed a table to consume your goodies with a wholesome cup o' Joe.

The third image is again from Wieda's--perhaps a little bit of payoff to Mr. Wieda for his (presidential) service to the association.  The black and white image does absolutely nothing to address it fabulously colored interior, with its lemon yellow ceiling, with the upper walls and curtains a burnt orange and the lower walls "a soft light green", all surrounding a terrazzo floor of maroon and gray.  The woodwork was all walnut, and the mirrors were "tinted flesh color, which is more flattering to the customer than the usual untinted mirror".  Oh my.

 

 

There was all sorts of information-sharing in the conference, evidently:  the best way to package and display candies, convincing mothers that candy was "food" after all and good for the kids, packaging candy so that it appealed to children, wrapping candy around other small gifts and trinkets, luring the customer into the candy store with more elaborate displays to pull you deeper inside, and so on.  There was allot of thinking going on here about sweets, which seems pretty inconsequential until you think about the fortunes made by Hans Sloane and the Wrigleys and Mars, especially with the later too, what with the gum company being purchased by the Mars family for billions of dollars--which is a lot of money for gum, which of course is hardly a candy.

In any event these stores are just gorgeous, and gorgeous in a way that their gorgeousness can never again be achieved--and I'm not sure why.  Maybe its because I'm not wearing one of those fabulous double-worsted suits that Bogey used to wear, not that he'd be found in one of these places.

A Comet's Tail in Eden: the Great Comet of 1680

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 301

The comet tail in this beautiful title page woodcut is hardly exaggerated—it was estimated that the tail was more than 30,000,000 miles long, or better than 70 degrees, at its highest and brightest. It illustrates the work on the Great Comet of 1680 by Erhard Weigel entitled Himmels-Zeiger der Bedeutung bey Erscheinung des ungemeinen Cometen , published in Jena by Bielcke in 1681.  Weigel was a polymath (philosopher, astronomer, mathematician,  logician and teacher ) who made minute  and exact observations of  this very famous comet in a micro- and macro-cosmic framework.  He looked at the physical aspects of the comet (head and tail, brightness and shape, etc.) and described its path. He also wrote about the  philosophical and relational aspects of the comet as well, bearing on its influence upon the weather and man, as well as  its influence on the structure of astrology.

The comet was actually discovered in November 1680 by Gottfried Kirch, and it was discovered in a novel, unique way: via the use of a telescope.  It was scientifically remarkable because it offered possibilities for the study of its path, which in turn could reveal the Larger Writ issues of teh clockwork universe in general.  .

There were some earlier sources—including Edmund Halley (who was inaccurately described as the discoverer of the periodicity of comets)--that had this comet appearing in 44 ACE, another time in the consulate of Lampaduis and Orestes, and another time in the reign of Henry I in 1106; that is, a period of 575 years. It was the unfortunate estimate, or opinion, of William Whiston (who was chosen by Isaac Newton to take over his chair of mathematics at Trinity College in Cambridge when Newton dedicated himself more fully to his role as president of the Royal Society**). that the 1680 Comet had caused the flood of Noah and, perhaps more disastrously, brushed the Garden of Eden. Perhaps he was thinking of Cicero*, “from the remotest remembrance of antiquity it is known that comets have always presaged disasters.” (See Whiston's “The Cause of the Deluge Demonstrated, being an Appendix to the 2nd edition of the New Theory of the Earth” (London, 1708))

The Great Comet of 1680 was the most extraordinary in the bright-comet-filled period of 1680-1682, and there's certainly more to write about--I really just wanted to write on the comet woodcut because I think that it is odd and beautiful. 

Notes:

*Cicero, De Natura Deorum: “Ab ultima antiquitatis memoria notatum cometas semper calamitatum praenuntios fuisse.” The Pythagoreans believed that great comets appear at great intervals of time.

** For god only knows what reason(s) Whiston was later denied membership to the Royal Society, I guess with the knowledge of Newton; so he was good enough to teach in Newton’s eat but not good enough to be invited to the big boy table to eat.

Descriptions from New York State and Manhattan of the Great Comet of 1680:

Excerpt from The History of Kingston, by Marius Schoonmaker, 1888, at page 70 

“On the 9th of December 1680, there appeared an extraordinary comet, which caused very great consternation throughout the province, with forebodings of dreadful happenings and divine punishments. It is described, in a letter dated January 1st, 1681, as having �appeared in the Southwest on the ninth of December last, about two o�clock in the afternoon, fair sunshine weather, a little above the sun, which takes its course more northerly, and was seen the Sunday night, right after about twilight, with a very fiery tail or streamer in the west, to the great astonishment of all spectators, and is now seen every night with clear weather. Undoubtedly, God threatens us with dreadful punishments if we do not repent. The letter then suggested the propriety of proclaiming a day of humiliation and prayer. “

An excerpt from The Encyclopedia of Geography, By Hugh Murray, Philadelphia., 1837, Vol 1 at page 115 describes the visit of this comet also;

“A very remarkable comet was seen in the end of 1680 and beginning of 1681. Its tail extended 70 degrees, and was very brilliant. This comet, of all those which have been observed, approaches nearest to the sun. Descending with immense velocity in a path almost perpendicular to his surface, it proceeded until its distance from his centre was only about 540,000 miles. Sir Isaac Newton computed that, in consequence of so near an approach to the sun, it must have received a heat 2000 times greater than that of iron almost going into fusion; and that if it was equal in magnitude to our earth, and cooled in the same manner as terrestrial bodies, its heat would not be expended in less than 50,000 years."

 

The Empty, Missing Thoughts of Hitler Youth Girls, 1937

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 300
This installment on blank and empty things is a continuation of the empty diary thread. The Jahrbuch der Jungmaedel 1937 is unsued and empty of unpublished thoughts; it was intended as a receptacle for the girls who were accepted into the Jungmaedlbund (translatable as “Young Girl’s League”), an extension of the Hitler Youth organization to female children aged 10-14.  Girls between the ages 14 and 18 were encouraged to be members of the Bund Deutsche Maedel (BDM), and finally, for the last stage of girlhood, there was the Glaube und Schoenheit section ("Belief and Beauty") for girls 18 to 21, for grooming into the married and domestic (Nazi) life. The Jungsturm Adolf Hitler, the umbrella organization for all of this,  began in 1922, soon after the creation of the NSDAP, and sought to develop the next generation of Aryan supermen, thoroughly indoctrinated in Nazism, and come their 18th birthday (or sooner) would become reliable and trusted soldiers.  There were various subgroups in a web-y complication of organizations, all of which kept the minds of dozens of thousands of children under close control; and, by 1936, all German boys were compelled to become Hitler Youth. 

 

The forward to this booklet was by the leader of the Jungmaedel, Baldor von Schirach, who was later the head of the Hitler-Jugend (HJ, Hitler Youth) and Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter ("Reich Governor") of Vienna. He lived until 1974, ably surviving his prosecution and conviction as a war criminal for his role in the deportation of Viennese Jews. His work in shaping the propaganda and the minds of children in Nazi Germany was so far as I can see not an issue at his trial. He and Albert Speer did denounce Hitler during their trials at Nuremberg—the only officials brought to justice who did so—and was sentence to 20 years in Spandau

Schirach's wife, Henriette, divorced him a few years into his retirerment.  She lived until 1992.  I wonder what Baldor and Henriette talked about at dinner?  What was there pillow talk like?  I wonder what she was thinking in the years that she spent alone, or in her final 37 days on earth? Did she wait for death's embrace to take her to some higher Aryan plane?  Did she regret her own acquiesence of what her husband was doing, or did she fool herself into believing that nothing horrible was happening?  Her husband gave some evidence during his trial that he sent protesting notes to Martin Bormann about the "bad" treatment of the Jews, and that he had no idea about the exterminations.  (He also claimed that the idea for the antisemitism in Germany came from Henry Ford's The International Jew.  That Ford bears some responsibility for this and other pro-Fascist actions is correct and not debatable.)  I'd like to see Henriette's diary if she dared keep one.  If there wasn't a diary, it would be interesting to write it for her.

Deep Discrimination in a Classic of Anti-Discrimination: Japanese Americans and World War II

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 299

For another project of mine I’ve been reading about the Japanese internment camps (posting an earlier post here), and just started to read some post war material on the interpretation of those actions. The first book I turned to is regarded as a liberal (in the classic sense of the word) regard and homage to the Japanese in the Hawaiian Islands by John Adrian Rademaker, (a Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii 1944-1947), who in 1951 published These Are Americans: The Japanese Americans in Hawaii During World War II . It documents the contributions made to the war effort by of people of Japanese ancestry living in Hawaii, including the Varsity Victory Volunteers, the 100th Infantry Battalion, and the 442nd RCT, and so far as I can determine is one of the earliest pioneering works to attempt to right the significant wrong done to these people.

In the past I always thought of it as a photographic essay, and I’m sure that I never actually read the thing., But this time I, I did, and I was stopped almost immediately, half-way through the first sentence.

It reads:

“During World War II, I was one of a considerable number of persons who were directly concerned with the care and re-establishment of the Japanese Americans in the continental United States.”

 To be honest about it, I’m not sure what this means or where it came from.   The rest of the sentences in the 277 pages of this book are laudatory and informative and attempt to right the public opinion wrongs of the wartime Japanese-American persona. But “care and re-establishment” is awful and weird, and stupid—so much so I wonder if the phraselet was stuck in there by some zealot editor. Removing 110,000 Americans from their lives and residences and families and communities and businesses, stripping them ¾ of whom were American citizens) of their rights, forcing them to sell whatever they couldn’t carry at fire sale prices, and then sticking them all in horse stalls or deeply removed and very difficult locations for three years is disgustingly-not “care and re-establishment”.

Unless of course the author believed it, and if such is the case then he really didn’t understand what happened to those 110,000 people, sociologist or not; or at least didn’t get it in 1951.

He did make a strong case overall for the American Japanese in Hawaii being loyal citizens/ Rademaker points out that 1,440 Americans of Japanese Ancestry (AJA) who were detained by local authorities (excluding Federal efforts) out of a population of over 150,000 AJA in Hawaii. They were nearly all Issei (first generation immigrants) and Nisei (born in the USA)

From December 7, 1941till the end of the war, some 1,440 AJAs were picked up by the authorities. This constituted nine-tenths of one percent of the AJAs in Hawaii. 879 of those were Japanese Issei, first-generation immigrants. 534 were Nisei. Nearly half of this number were released after preliminary hearings, with the rest being “kept” for other reasons, though they were simply community leaders (doctors, nurses, school teachers, benign) and that sort of thing. He states that no AJA in Hawaii was ever convicted or found to have committed any treasonable offense or committed any sabotage whatsoever.

I’m just pointing out how odd this first sentence is in the face of the rest of the book. Was it meant to diminish the American government’s actions in rounding up and removing these people? (The government has had a very long history of doing exactly this, and doing it deathly well—just look at the hundreds of Indian “removals”, the entire institution of slavery, and many, many others, up to and including to a lesser degree the displacement of Katrina refugees.) Arrest and disappearing people is not “care and re-establishment”, period.

For the record, another truly measurable aspect of AJA fortitude is their military participation during WWII which stands as follows (presenting the 100 Battalion of the 442 and then the 442 as a unit):

The 100th Battalion and 442nd Combat team:

Killed in action  569.
Died of wounds 81.
Missing in action 67.
Wounded in action 3,506.
Injured in action  177.
Total casualties  4,120.

The 100th Battalion and the 442nd Combat Team won the following decorations:

1 Medal of Honor

1 Medal of Honor
47 Distinguished Service Cross
1 Distinguished Service Medal
12 Oak Leaf Cluster to Silver Star
350 Silver Star
18 Legion of Merit
16 Soldier's Medal
41 Oak Leaf Cluster-to Bronze Star Medal
823 Bronze Star Medal
1 Air Medal
500 Oak Leaf Cluster to Purple Heart Medal
3600 Purple Heart Medal
2 Army Commendation Ribbon
40 Army Commendation
87 Division Commendation
1 brigade Commendation
12 Croix De Guerre (French)
2 Palm to Croix De Guerre (French)
2 Croce Al Merito Di Guerra (Italilan)
2 Medaglia De Bronzo Al Valor Militare (Italian)

Overall the 442—composed entirely of Japanese Americans, emerged as the most decorated combat unit of its size in the history of the United States Army —suffered an “unprecedented casualty rate of 314 percent and received over 18,000 individual decorations. Many were awarded after their deaths for bravery and courage in the field of battle. Among the decorations received by the 100th/442nd soldiers were one Medal of Honor, 52 Distinguished Service Crosses, 560 Silver Stars, 28 Oak Leaf Clusters to the Silver Star, 4,000 Bronze Stars and 1,200 Oak Leaf Clusters to the Bronze Star and, perhaps most telling of the sacrifices made by these gallant soldiers, 9,486 Purple Hearts.” The 442nd Combat Infantry group emerged as the most decorated combat unit of its size in the history of the United States Army.

An Empty Interest in Applying for the Women's Branch of the KKK. ca. 1925

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 298

I just very recently made a post about a sub-category of blank and empty things: blank special-purpose diaries. I didn’t think that there would be much that would follow it, but already I’ve found several interesting relational objects.   This very understated and interesting object lacks the name of the organization for the ladies:  and that name was the Ku Klux Klan, which changes everything about this innocuous-looking piece of ephemera. 

How many of these forms for the Women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK) were filled out in the 1920’s and 1930’s?

At least 500,000. And more, as this was the number of women members of the Klan, which  was about a quarter of the entire roll of the KKK.

Evidently the WKKK was one of the largest social organizations for women in the U.S.
in those decades. In 1925 more than 35,000 KKK members paraded down Pennsylvania   Avenue;
three years later, another huge parade took place, this time prominently featuring the WKKK. The KKK after all supported women, after its fashion, and actively sought them as an auxiliary force, seeking their right to vote as well. And by the right to vote it meant literally RIGHT voting—no voting for anyone or anything that was not “100% American”, which excluded everyone that was not native-born, white and (sort of) Protestant, voting against anything that was in any way in favor of Blacks or Jews or Catholics or immigrants and so on from a long list of “undesirables”.

The emptiness of this application for possible membership has as much hope in its emptiness as its possibility of hate in its completion.

A few interesting works on this subject include:

Blee, Kathleen. Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

McGehee, Margaret T. “Beneath the Sheets: An Intellectual History of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK), 1923–31.” MA thesis, University
of Mississippi, 2000.

Seaver, Darcy L. “Women in the Hood: Women in 1920s Ku Klux Klan Publications.” MA thesis, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1992.

The "Secret" Life of the Pronunciation of the Word "Nuclear"

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Non-post 3

The word"nuclear" has never had such a hard as it has during the past eight years or so. Mr. Bush has mispronounced it thousands of times, somehow; but I thought that with his leaving,, "nookuler" would seem like a lumpy bag of trash receding in the rear view mirror.

I thought this until two evenings ago during the cordials shared by two vice presidential candidates.  Gov. Palin, in trying to cozy up a little to whatever is left of the 1980's-ghost Ronald Wilson Reagan crowd with repeated allusions to the old man bumped into that lumpy bag of useless Bush fat at least nine times (not that I was counting), pronouncing "nuclear" in the old, creative Bushian way, and then some.  Though I have little doubt that the governor can read the word, it leaves me cold that she can't actually pronounce the word on the great big red button that her finger might actually touch some day. 

Empty Memory: Telephone Number 20080 (Warsaw), Nazi Occupied Poland and the Holocaust, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 296

 I've felt that a great history lesson for school kids would be to make them keep a diary for some other kid from some other time, introduce them to the minutiae of life from another time and perhaps another place.  With some guidance they could make interesting entries in their diary for, say, 15 June 1897, writing about chores, the daily schedule, what they studied in school, how they were dressed, how they got food on the table and kept the house clean, how they would spend 25 cents, what they would see from some given vantage point, and on and on.  This could take place in their very own home town; it could be multi-generational, requiring them to talk to the scary white hairs, or it could reach far back into history and be of an entirely different place altogether.  After they were assigned a particular place in time and space, you could give the kid subtle hints, like this one (below), asking them what they thought it might mean by dialing the phone number 200 80 in Warsaw in 1941.  And what did that pair of lightning bolts mean, anyway?  I think that once they were made to figure it out for themselves, as though they might've been there, and then could record their feelings and observations in a diary might actually bring history to life (especially once they had their "holy crap" (and probably worse) moment at what these numbers implied). 

This is one of the ideas that came home again uncovering this odd booklet, which is a Nazi diary for those stationed in the Generalgouvernment (Tascehnjahrbuch 1941 fuer den Deutschen im Generalgouvernement) ,  for the year 1941. The General Government (or more fully the Generalgouvernement für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete) was one administrative section of occupied Poland, the country being divided in 1939 after the German invasion of 3 September 1939, with the western section being retained by the Germans and the Eastern given over to occupation by the Soviets via the Non-Aggression pact between the USSR and Germany.   

This looks like an every day diary for the period, except for the Nazi (or NSDAP) regalia and German imprint of Generalgouvernment in Krakau.  And, all of the annotated highpoints of the year for the most overly voracious parts of German militarism as well as for the hotpoints of Nazi history.  Hitler, (above) Goering, Goebbels and other leaders' birthdays are highlighted, not to mention seminal points in the development of the Nazi party and party-adoptees (Richard Wagner has a number of entries for suggested celebrations). 

There are also helpful directories in the back pointing to any number of cafes located in a growing number of "Adolf Hilter Platz's" throughout Poland (including three in Radom), as well as fares for the use of the railway and postal system. 

We also see the following telephone number:  23075.  That's for the Literarische Kaffee Stefansgasse I, Krakau. This is the location that the Reichsminister and administrator Hans Frank (about whom we'll read inb a moment) decided to hold a chess tournament in 1941, to satisfy his own need for chess while freshly in the pursuit of the murder of millions of people.

‘Frank was extremely interested in chess. He not only possessed an extensive library of chess literature but was also a good player, and he even “received” the Ukrainian chess master Bogoljubow at the castle. On 3 November 1940 he organized a chess congress in Cracow. Six months later he announced the setting-up of a chess school under Bogoljubow and the chess master Dr Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine, and he visited a chess tournament in October 1942 at the “Literary Café” in Cracow."--Hans Frank (subtitle: Hitlers Kronjurist und Generalgouverneur) by Dieter Schenk (Frankfurt am Main, 2006) "and quotes a reference to chess on page 177 (given below in our translation)..."[Source: Chesshistory.com., here.]

For the record, the Generalgouvernement was proclaimed in October 1939 just after the invasion of Poland and included most of what was left of Poland, which was gone again, barely 20 years after it returned to the map following WW1.  In March 1941 Hitler made a decision to "turn this region into a purely German area within 15-20 years". He also explained that "Where 12 million Poles now live, is to be populated by 4 to 5 million Germans. The Generalgouvernement must become as German as Rhineland".  Following the Wannsee conference of 20 January 1942, the Secretary of State of the Generalgouvernment, Dr. Josef Buhler (Warsaw # 222 05, a listed number in this book) began implementation if the Final Solution in Poland; by the time the Soviets entered and took control in late  1944, more than 4 million people—most of them Jewish—had been killed. 

[Photograph of a Jewish policeman, from the Jost collection.¹]

The man in charge of it all here in Poland, Hans Frank, has his photographic portrait as the frontispiece, and his number is listed, too. He was an horrendous butcher who was tried and convicted and executed for his crimes against humanity (at Nuremberg on 16 October 1946, aged 46--the decision of the court read, in part, that Frank was "...a willing and knowing participant in both the use of terrorism in Poland, as in the economic exploitation of Poland in a way that led to the starvation of a large number of people, also in the deportation of more than one million Poles as slave laborers to Germany and in execution of a program that had the murder of at least three million Jews. ").  In a speech December 16, 1941, Hans Frank said:"We cannot shoot these 3.5 million Jews [in Poland], we cannot poison them, but we will take measures that will somehow lead to successful destruction; and this in connection with large-scale procedures which are to be discussed in the Reich, the Government-General must become as free of Jews as the Reich .....We must destroy the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is at all possible, in order to maintain the whole structure of the Reich..." Frank did his share of annihilation of Polish Jews and Polish citizens--almost as much as any other Nazi official, government or military leader--over the six years (1939-1945) that he ruled over this territory.

[Another image from the Jost collection.]

Josef Buhler, by the way, was tried after the war by the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland for crimes against humanity, condemned to death on July 10, 1948, and executed in Kraków.

This is really a fetid little booklet, its empty pages waiting for some sort of horror, all of which was actually taking place in real life, escaping  their record.

Distribution of food in General Government as of December, 1941

Nationality	Daily calorie intake
Germans	2310
Foreigners	1790
Ukrainians	930
Poles	654
Jews	184

I wonder where all of those conversations went, exactly, after they were ended.  Did they sink into the copper wire like auditory signals (very very slightly trapped) in clay pots?  I think not of course. But all of those phone numbers in this book to all of the special police and propaganda police and racial police and SS and on and on, all of those calls and conversations about this horrific undertaking, just seem to me as though they should've gone somewhere, caught in the myth of the machine, somewhere in the electromagnetic world, like a primitive internet.

I really can't stand what those simple phone numbers meant.

Footnotes:

1.  The Generalgouvernement was the central part of three general districts of the divided Poland, and it proved to be the terminal for millions of people deemed as undesirable or threatening.  It was particuarly impossible for Jews, the Generalgouvernement proving to be the place where they were collected in ghettos and housed under mniserable and starvation conditions until they began to be shipped out to concentration camps in early 1942.  By 1944 all of the ghettos had been liquidated, and with them, their inhabitants.  The Soviets did finally liberate the Generalgouvernement (from the Nazis) under delayed conditions in the winter of 1945, initiating Pogroms against the Jews by summertime.

Notes:

The Wannsee conference (I will not use a capital “C) was a meeting of leading  Nazi officials and treacle who formed the decision to implement the Final Solution t the “Jewish problem” in Germany— it was the real beginning of the Holocaust.

The men who made this determination to begin with the wholesale destruction of human beings included:

SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich (Chief of the RSHA and Reichsprotektor of Bohemia-Moravia), presiding
Dr Josef Bühler (Government of the General Government)
Dr Roland Freisler (Reich Ministry of Justice)
SS-Gruppenführer Otto Hofmann (Race and Resettlement Main Office, RuSHA)
SA-Oberführer Dr Gerhard Klopfer (NSDAP Chancellery)
Ministerialdirektor Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger (Reich Chancellery)
SS-Sturmbannführer Dr Rudolf Lange (Commander of the SD for Latvia)
Reichsamtleiter Dr Georg Leibbrandt (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories)
Martin Luther (Foreign Office)
Gauleiter Dr Alfred Meyer (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories)
SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller (Chief of Amt IV (Gestapo), Reich Security Main Office (RSHA))
Erich Neumann (Director, Office of the Four Year Plan)
SS-Oberführer Dr Karl Eberhard Schöngarth (SD, assigned to the General Government)
Dr Wilhelm Stuckart (Reich Ministry for the Interior)
SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann (Head of Referat IV B4 of the Gestapo), minutes secretary

1. “German soldier Heinz Jost strolled through the Warsaw Ghetto taking illegal pictures. Almost 50 years later, they resurface in a disturbing exhibition.”

“An enfeebled urchin lies clutching the sidewalk like a breast. Three people pass by behind it; only one of them, a malnourished woman, looks down at the child. In a second or two, they will be gone and the child will be alone again, even more helpless, if that is possible. Did such dying children (there were thousands of them in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941) know that something was horribly wrong with the world? Or did they think that squalid suffering is all that this disappointing life has to offer? wrote children, Mary Berg wrote in her diary of the ghetto, "no longer have a human appearance and are more like monkeys than children. They no longer beg for bread, but for death." Terribly, the child on the sidewalk cocks its eye at the camera, unable to ward off the final cruelty of being photographed by a German soldier.

“Eerie approximation: Heinz Jost, a small-town hotelkeeper serving in the German Army, had the day off on Sept. 19, 1941. It was also his birthday. For reasons lost to history, Jost decided to spend the day inside the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto. He carried a camera and, contrary to regulations, took 129 photographs of the ghetto and its doomed inhabitants. The pictures lay unseen in a dresser drawer for four decades before Jost rediscovered them. He gave them to the German magazine Stern, which donated them in 1987 to the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem.

“What Jost found in this neighborhood consecrated to death was an eerie approximation of normal daily life that only gradually (especially as the exhibition is arranged) reveals its ghastliness. At first, street life seems no more deprived than that in lower Manhattan earlier in the century. And the jackbooted soldiers relaxing in a touring car appear more arrogant than evil. But surely they must have known, as Chaim Kaplan recorded in his Warsaw diary, that "Anywhere a tree has been planted, or a bench has been placed, Jewish children are forbidden to derive enjoyment." Elsewhere, peddlers hawk bread, grubby vegetables and coal by the individual lump, one woman sells Star of David armbands in varieties from printed paper to embroidered linen. "These armbands are very much in demand in the ghetto because the Germans arevery `sensitive' on this score, and when they notice a Jew wearing a crumpled or dirty armband, they beat him at once," Mary Berg observed. After these images, the pictures of gaunt bodies on morbid rickshaws, the merciless common graves and the catatonic attendants are but numbing epilogue.

“There are those who say that to measure any other barbarism against the Holocaust is to trivialize the unequaled tragedy that befell the Jews. Looking at these pictures, however, it is hard not to be struck by resemblances that suggest that the horror of the Holocaust has not been obliterated, but simply broken up, crushed into powder and raked into the soil of contemporary life. Even in our very rich country, the number of tattered beggars, slumped in despair on city streets, grows steadily greater. The bearded, skull-like heads of the Warsaw Ghetto's interned are remindful of AIDS victims in the last stages of the plague. And it is almost impossible not to realize that we have seen, and still see, pictures of bodies of innocents lying dead under perversely meaningless advertising signs, at the feet of blase soldiers who think they're just doing their jobs.”

And another, shorter review:

Heinrich Jöst's Photographs. In the Ghetto of Warsaw: Heinrich Jost's Photographs, edited by Gunther Scharberg,  published by  Scalo, distributed  by D.A.P. 2001.

“Among the many books released on the Holocaust, the complete set of Jöst's photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto is a valuable resource for scholars. Jöst, a hotel owner and sergeant in the Wehrmacht, took photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto in late 1941, which he shared with the journalist Schwarberg in 1982. Originally exhibited at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, these photographs are now available, along with Jöst's recollections, to a wide audience (Jöst died in 1983). Although the graphic nature of the pictures is disturbing they show, for instance, starving children dying in the streets they provide a record of the Warsaw Ghetto separate from official Nazi propaganda and as such are extremely valuable. Recommended for all libraries.”
--By Frederic Krome, Jacob Rader Marcus Ctr. of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati.

Empty Cows with Empty Eyes: Blank and Empty Things Department #12

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 295

I’ve made several posts about Blank and Missing People and Empty Things which seem to me—having had long exposure to images over the last 30 years—to be quite unusual in the history of popular-published prints. This may actually be a simple corollary to a wider category of Blank Things, or Missing Things.  Like Dark Matter.  Or white, open, blank spaces on early, honest, maps. (And this may be part of another larger story on The  Spaces in Between, (a concept in German known as Zwischenraum), but that’s another story, identifying where the missing stuff might actually “be”.  Like the idea of "negative space", or unused space, in, say, a Zen painting, or the sue of quiet in a musical composition--generally, it is a period of space or transition in thought, the distance between ideas....)

Since it really is so unusual to bump into these images I'll just make a quick post on this one--it is simply (in a not-so-simple way) an illustration of a cow-blind from the wonderful and problematic masterpiece of Abraham Rees' Encyclopedia, this print being completed in 1812.  I should point out that the hunters--who would level their muskets through the empty eye socket--are not hunting cows; I'm not aware of what they would be hunting, but I know that it wasn't Bessie. So the image is really just a relatively mundane hunting tool, though pretty elaborate, set among other hunting tools--there is nothing mundane whatsoever about its presentation, though. 

(Detail above, and from the full sheet, below)

Peculiar, Found-Art Image: Hight Rises, Straight Stubby NYC Ferry and a Lonely Tank

JF Ptak Science Books LLC    Post 294

It is unusual in my experience to stumble upon three unusual, found-art images (as in the three below) that are found on one page of a magazine.  In this case, it is the Illustriete Zeitung (Leipzig), issue 4299 (page 178) for 1915, and the three photographs are all quite atonal, somehow--they're just not quite "right", and all perhaps for different reasons.

The first image shows this unusual private ferry in New York City harbor--how this made any sense, I don't know, especially since that water is pretty choppy and this vessel looks not terrifically seaworthy.  The passenger (or driver at least) and the boatman are also very, very straight!  I honestly just don't know anything about single-car ferries in the harbor so late in the game as 1915.

I'm not sure why this image strikes me as being so peculiar in the second image--perhaps it is simply the retreating perspective, or the fact that it looks like a drawing, or the placards along the construction fence at the bottom of the photo; or maybe its the only solitary-looking  figure set against all of those (strangely opened) windows.  Whatever it is, that is odd or somewhat "off", I like it.

The third image is just quite and odd.  Is that bridge portable and expandable?  Is it actually supporting the tank and not failing? It is just a flat-out uncommon composition.

Perhaps the unifying factor here is the very apparent "quietness" of the pictures, and their solitude, even in the midst of the NYC harbor.

 

Hidden, Odd Actions in Empty Spaces

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 293

This engraving (on copper) of an interior of a structure houses
some interesting perspective, as well as a very unusual pose by one of the four gentleman who were added to the image to give a sense of depth and scale.  I've written earlier about such hidden artistic virtues and micro-sub-arts, and this print fits nicely for its naive oddness of character placement.

One just has to wonder what in the world the artist had in mind by placing this figure in such an uncommon stance?  I cannot remember seeing a three-square hat like this looking at it straight on from the top; more important, though, is what is this fellow doing?  I'd suspect measuring, but under very close inspection he's holding nothing at all in his hands.  Also that unit of measurement would be pretty short for a job measuring a room such as this.
So:  what is he doing?

A River of Men: French Prisoners in Laon, May, 1918

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I came across this impossible  image in the 6 June 1918 issue of Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig)  It is almost unbelievable that the bumps and twists and angles of this mass were humans, though at least they were alive. The original was taken on 21 March and shows part of the  210,000  prisoners that were being held in Laon--they seem, at least by their helmets, to be French soldiers.  (The 210,000 figure is German and wartime and intended for German readership; it seems that the real figure was 85,000--still massive.)

Laon is a French Medieval city of magnificent architecture--its cathedral can be seen in the background, in stark contrast to this human blanket. Looking at this image with a magnifying glass, I can see virtually no open ground space in the mass of men.  I estimate that in this photo are 7500 men:  I also figure that the area that we see here (to the left of the open path)  is approximately 400 feet long and 40 feet wide, or roughly a third of an acre.  I'm not sure what was going on here, though it looks like they might be on the move, with the men in the right-hand part of the image stretching off into the distance.  What is also troubling is that so many of these men seem to be asleep, and judging from the way the shadows have fallen it seems to be mid-morning (not early).  Perhaps they've just been marched in from battle and are totally exhausted.  I just don't know--they just don't look like people.

Ships in the Skyline Part III

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 291

In another unlikely-to-be-added-to category, Ships in the Skyline, I've found, surprisingly, a third installment. (I guess that there are many more as I've found these guys without actually looking for them, though perhaps that is the trick to finding things (that you don't need).)  The comparisons that we see here for the ship The Cunarder, appeared in The Illustrated London News for 29 September 1934, and the skyline that it  is favored against is  London's Big Ben.  Interestingly, the graphic goes on to compare the powertrain of the ship to 100 "Cock o' the North type locomotives" to generate its 200,000 horsepower; also, the amount of steel frame found in the ship  (32,000 tons) is comparable to the steel framing of the brand-new Empire State Building (58,000 tons in the steel framework).  Of further interest is the relief of a human set against the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square and the top of the ship's fore funnel (reaching 170').  This is just fantastic design and some good thinking about how to make the dimensions of the ship more understandable in everyday terms, and thus compares it in size and capacity to stuff that people see most every day, or at least know.

   

Electric Surf and the First Touch of the Ocean by Blind Children; Coney Island, 1878

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This woodcut is from the Leipzig equivalent of LIFE or The Illustrated London News:  Illustrirte Zeitung, and was published in August 1878.  It appeared in the same issue as the very first image of Edison's phonograph in a European publication (just two pages away)  It was a big issue for Edison in Germany, as he was of course principally responsible for not only integrating minor discoveries of others into a revolutionary discovery of his own (the electric light and light bulb), but was also reasonable in the largest part for the physical distribution of energy to those light bulbs.  And so it came to be that the beach at Coney Island--one of metropolitan New York's greatest recreational sites--was lighted by a  portable electric "floodlight"  (though I don't know what the illuminating part was--perhaps it was a carbon-arc something or other, as I'm pretty sure it wasn't a light bulb" as we would think of it...nevertheless the source was electrical).  It had never in human history happened before that people could frolic in the surf under an artificial source of illumination--it had to have been an extraordinary sensation.  The light appeared in the same year that the The Camera Obscura Observatory was established (borrowed from 1876 Philadelphia Exposition) and just nine short years after the "great" Charles Feltman invented the Coney Island hot dog (though my favorites of the boardwalk was Nathan's big crinkly french fries in a paper cone).

Right above this image was this extremely emotional wood engraving of blind children being taken to the beach for the first time (at Sheepshead Bay)--my German is pretty rough, but it seems as though they were on a field trip from their  institutional home, which was something like a  "waif" school for the "deaf, dumb and blind" or something 19th-centuryish like that. 

It is a deeply touching image to me, showing tremendous touch and care...these children, drawn tightly together, feeling and smelling the vastness of the ocean, feeling the full sun on their faces, experiencing it together and separately, overwhelmed, gentle--thirteen children and three matrons and not a smile, all deep  in a private world flooded with feeling.

A 117x1 Mile Blanket of Planes: What 185,000 Planes Looks Like

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 289

This arresting cover image for The Illustrated London News of 21 February 1942 illustrates the (new) American production program for planes and tanks for 1942 and 1943 (It reminds me too of an earlier post I did with a similar cover for LIFE magazine here.) The caption reads: "185,000 planes form a mile-wide blanket of bombers under a blanket of fighters stretching 117 miles" which is actually a double blanket of planes--if they were thinned out to form one layer it would stretch one mile wide from Washington D.C. to New York City, which is quite an unimaginable ribbon.

The reality of the situation was greater than this:  by 1945 over 300,000 planes were produced, 275,000 of them after Pearl Harbor.  And this from a combined aviation industry which before 1939 had produced fewer than 6,000 planes a year.  The war effort increased this by orders of magnitude, and by war's end there were 81 production facilities with a combined area of 175 million feet, all bumped up within four years.   I've never read about it, but I have no doubt that one of the key ingredients to this sort of hyper-successful undertaking was organization--the oversight and control for this process must've been fast and decisive, with little room for mid-level anything.  I think that this is the only way the whole thing could've worked so well. 

Why Are Mailboxes So Ugly?

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 288
 

Really--how is it that such ubiquitous American objects are so ugly? Evidently the first public mailbox in the U.S. was a “street letter box” designed and patented by P.B. Downing, and African American inventor, 27 October 1891, 48 years after the first box appeared in Britain; and the design of these things has gone downhill ever since.

I remember reading about this issue being addressed somewhere—I thought it might’ve been Walter Benjamin, buried somewhere in his weirdly beautiful Arcades Project; but, no, it was in Kurt Tucholsky’s Deutschland Deutschalnd Ueber Alles. The Tucholsky book originally appeared in 1929 (the same year the author dumped Germany for Sweden) and was illustrated by photo montage by the great John Heartfield.

Tucholsky stated “for some unknown reason mailboxes have to be ugly. Why?” Addressing the German postal boxes he wrote “these mailboxes were designed in complete ignorance of the principle that simple things an be beautiful if their proportions are related. Because the post office mentality is limited. Because the post office has a monopoly. Because bureaucracies, in their limitless self-importance, will take a single step forward only when the technologies are miles ahead…because there is no reason in the world why the state should employ people for life. Because it is insane to breed apathy, and because the company needs interested workers, not an army of officials…any well run business moves faster. A multitude of bureaucrats is death to the taxpayer.”

“And that’s why mailboxes are so ugly.”

This was one of the least of Tucholsky’s biting, driven observations about his failing state. And still correct.