JF Ptak Science Books

British Prisoners of War Calling! (1940)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post  See also an earlier post (with further links Humanitarian Propaganda--the Hope for those at Home.

This was certainly a civilized format to solicit sympathy and money for British P.O.W.s being held by the Germans, 13 months into a war that would force its way on for another 43 months.  It appeared as a bold full-page ad in The Illustrated London News on 16 November 1940, and it asked readers--who were now in the final phases of the Battle of Britain after full-on aerial assaults for through the summer months costing dozens of thousands of deaths--to think about the soldiers who had made the great sacrifice in protecting their country and being taken captive for it, and to give money so that some sort of comfort and aid could be sent to them in POW camps.  

The goal from the outside seems reasonable enough--it remains to be seen how much of the million tons of good shipped to the POW camps by the Allied Forces ever made it to the prisoners. 

I've included this short post in the History of Empty, Blank and Missing Things series not because of the hopelessness of delivering modest relief, but for a much more simple reason--exhibiting the unused coupon for sending funds to make that happen.  It has a certain emotional power to it that is difficult for me to identify.  

 "Communications have been reopened and it is the aim of the fund to equip every prisoners' camp in Germany with a library, indoor and outdoor games, sporting gear, musical instruments and other goods. As a result of the debacle in the Lowlands and France the demand upon our resources has been very great and we are therefore issuing an appeal to Britons all over the world to help us in this work."

The donation form is a detail from thi sbig, full-page ad from the Illustrated London News for November 16, 1940: 

The West Australian (Perth), 30 October 1940:

"PATRIOTIC EFFORTS.PRISONERS OF WAR.A Books and Games Fund.Information was received yesterday concerning the formation of a British Prisoners of War Books and Games Fund in England, under the chairmanship of Sir Hugh Walpole. "As you know, there are now many thousands of British prisoners of war in German camps,"states Mr. J. A. Sinclair Pooley, of the appeal section of the fund, in a pamphlet received in Perth. "Communications have been reopened and it is the aim of the fund to equip every prisoners' camp in Germany with a library, indoor and outdoor games, sporting gear, musical instruments and other goods. As a result of the debacle in the Lowlands and France the demand upon our resources has been very great and we are therefore issuing an appeal to Britons all over the world to help us in this work."Owing to stringent Government regulations no books, games or other goods can be accepted by the fund, but monetary donations may be forwarded to the British Prisoners of War Books and Gamesfund, Carrington House, Hertford-street,London W.1, England.Under the scheme a prisoner can be adopted by any person so that, on receipt of donations, he will be supplied with books, puzzles and games in the name of the donor. The fund does not duplicate the work of the Red Cross Society in supplying food, clothing and educational literature."

Lowering the Mediterranean, 1930 (!)

JF Ptak Science Books (continuing an earlier post) 

A Monumental and Potentially Fantastically Bad Idea: Draining the Mediterranean

   [Image source: private collection.]

"Simply the thing I am shall make me live."--from Jorge Luis Borges, "Shakespeare’s Memory"

   
It would be a Purgatory, or worse, to suddenly wake up one morning with another person's memory--worse yet than to have wished it, only to find that you didn't want it at all.  This evidently works out with memories high and low, though it is tempting to want to wish to see what the inspiration looked like for one idea located in a particular memory.  Or maybe not.  But I am curious about when and here the author of the pamphlet above got his idea, and what it looked like to him--did he hear or see or smell something that prompted the inspiration for this reverse-monumental jolt?

 It is interesting to pursue a loose thought like this to its not-necessarily logical end.  Such is the case with the self-styled Paneuropic ideas of Hermann Soergel (1885-1952), the author of the above. Soergel was a Bauhaus architect and author of a number of works on design and far more ethereal, floating-castle ideas. His most spectacular contribution—incubated in the mid-1920’s and still clinging by its fingertips as an idea among some current thinkers—was to put a dam across the straights of Gibraltar.  The dam would generate electricity of course, but most importantly to Soergel, it would also empty an enormous amount of water from the Mediterranean leaving vast new expanses of land to be developed and colonized over generations into the future.  The water of course would have to go somewhere, and that somewhere was the Sahara Desert, somehow in its wake creating farmable and productive lands. Soergel was creating a certain, very wide, fantastical future of uncertain monumental prospects.

A "brief outline" of the idea was published in this four-language pamphlet, Lowering the Mediterranean Irrigating the Sahara (Panropa Project), which was published by J.M. Gebhardt in Leipzig in the very bumpy year of 1929. (The Weimar years in Germany were already into deep bumpiness; the rest of the world would follow suit in October of that year.)  To be fair, Soergel didn't plan on emptying the entire Mediterranean, just a bunch of it--at least enough to be able to rename it.

[Here's a map of the new Mediterranean, or the Mediterranean that would be made to go away.  As you can see at this point Sicily and Italy become enormous, and the Greek Islands are combined to form one large land mass--this last bit alone is enough to form total and complete reisstance to this idea. Also at this stage perhaps 150 or so miles of new lands have been reclaimed from the sea all along its former borders--more so in Turkey.  There is no mention as yet of any new islands that are formed in the sea water's wake.]

The master plan at work was that the world would be divided into three economic spheres in the future, all beginning with the letter “A”:  American, Asia, and the new land to be created by Soergel, “Atlantropa”, which was the former Europe expanded into the new dry beds of the Mediterranean and North Africa.  And also of course Egypt, which would be covered with "thousands" of canals and become semi-submerged by the new borders of the meandering sea.  This would be the way for Europa to compete with the rest of the world in the future. 

[I should point out that the image above comes from the Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig) for August 1931, and is a drawing by an artist named "AS. Christ" depicting a cross section of one of the bridge/dams of Soergel's Panropa's ideas.]

Perhaps it is actually three steps to get from the idea of damming up the straits of Gibraltar to the osmosis of Shakespeare’s memories into someone else’s brain—a squinting acquiescence of the middle touch being the brilliant Jorge Luis Borges.  You see it was in the Argentine master’s last published story, "Shakespeare’s Memory", that we meet Herr Soergel (as Hermann Sorgel) again.  But so far as I can remember Soergel exists only as a fictional character, with no reference to his real-life self.  In this wonderful story, Soergel inherits the memories of William Shakespeare—these bits come to him slowly but surely, until they start to conflict with his own memory, and things get difficult.  The man with Shakespeare’s memories winds up phoning strangers on the telephone, giving them away at random, until Soergel is left with his own mind again.  Superior as Bill’s memories were, they still weren’t Hermann’s, who wanted his own life back in the end. 

And so from the titanic, pan-europic technodream of Bauhausian Hermann Soergel to the dead brains and living memories of William Shakespeare, all through the fingers of the beautiful Jorge Luis Borges.  

I'm sorry to report that at the end of it all, near the end of the pamphlet, Soergel releases his opinion on the political importance of his project.  And yes, his aim was to form an alliance between the new PanAmerica (of the "three Americas" with the new Pan-European African Union to thwart "the yellow peril" which "arises from the racial antipathy of India, China and Japan.  Soergel writes that "the fate of occidental civilization...will be settled on the Mediterranean".  

After it is all said and done, perhaps the best reiew of the work by Soergel is provided by the graphic designer who put the Big Red X on the cover of his work.  It fits. 

Some of the works by Soergel include the following:

   Atlantropa. Fretz & Wasmuth, Zurich / Piloty & Löhle, Munich 1932

Vorwort zu: Wayne W. Parrish : Technokratie - die neue Heilslehre , Piper, München 1933

Die drei großen A, Amerika, Atlantropa, Asien , 1938. The three large A, , Atlantropa, Asia, 1938

Atlantropa-ABC. Atlantropa ABC. Kraft, Raum, Brot. Kraft, Raum, Brot. Erläuterungen zum Atlantropa-Projekt , Arnd,Leipzig 1942 

Some works about  Soergel: 

Alexander Gall: The Atlantropa project. Die Geschichte einer gescheiterten Vision. The story of a failed vision. Herman Sörgel und die Absenkung des Mittelmeers .

Herman Sörgel and the lowering of the MEditerranean . Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1998. 

Wolfgang Voigt: Atlantropa. Wolfgang Voigt: Atlantropa. Weltbauen am Mittelmeer. Building the Mediterranean world.Ein Architektentraum der Moderne . An architects dream of modernity. Dölling und Galitz. Hamburg  1998.

 

 

 

Found-Art in Electrical Discharge, 1880

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2212  History of Anticipation series   

It makes me wonder about how things were labeled "art" in the history of labeling things.  In a way it is not at all like naming where the American "West" is, or where the "South" begins, because those definitions seem to get very local and very detailed very quickly, and then the labels get bigger and wider and more open to interpretation.  That is to say that the labels make more accommodation for the idea, at least far more so than the labeling of "art" was concerned in the pre-Kandinsky/Cubist/Abstract era, or at the very least before the era of early impressionism.  

This is a tiny detail from a full-plate plate from Nature, in an article by Warren de la Rue on electrical discharge (and printed 24 June 1880). (Actually, the big full-page images like this are fairly rare in Nature--more so when the image is mostly very dark, meaning they took a lot of ink to print.)  It is a beautiful thing, and was probably always considered beautiful in a scientific sense, though I think it would have been very highly unlikely for it to have been appreciated in an extra-scientific artistic sense by significant portion of the viewing population, let alone be called "art".  Even if someone approached it as Impressionistic, it still did not resemble anything recognizable, and those days for non-representational art was still more than 30 years away.  

 Calling things "art" was far more regulated at this in the art history than what it would become in the decade of so after the popularization of discussion on the fourth dimension and the discovery of the X-rays and Thomson's atom and then, just a little while later, the first appearance of the theory of relativity. The protocols were far more strict prior to the invention of Impressionism (I have no idea how J.M.W. Turner survived in his Outsider-y genre for all of those decades before progressive Impressionism) than those that existed in 1880, or at least for those that existed that could consider these electrical discharge images as "art".  

Of course Roualt and van Gogh and Rosseau and Braque and the rests had their own difficult experiences with acceptance, and some were even rejected by the groups that they helped to establish (like Duchamp with his readymades getting the heave-ho in NYC).  

In general though there were very few people who had one foot in the Beaux Ecole school who could have another foot in the expansive world who could have considered scientific images like these as "art".  

The full image: 

 

See also this post on Emily Van der Poel's beautiful pre-abstract/cubist found art :