Hollands Maandblad. Jaargang 1985 (446-457)

[p. 3]

[449]

WSH LXXX
(14 december '84)
Testimonials to Anecdotage
William S. Heckscher⁺

The arrangements for the feast were made by Betsy Sears as spiritus rector and master of ceremonies; Agnes Sherman was in charge of invitations and accounting; Araxie Heckscher did endless things behind the stage and the three did also the table arrangements of the 63 guests who were seated at flower-bedecked tables in groups of eight per table. Henry Heckscher also acted behind the scenes. Those helpers (except for Henry who preferred not to be mentioned in dispatches), WSH thanked in his introductory remarks. He toasted Irving Lavin who shares the 14th as his (57th) birthday as well as Franz Josef - the chef-de-cuisine; as wel as Jamie Boswell since Jamie, Jerry and WSH co-celebrated Jamie's Jugtown birthday annually. Heckscher thanked Mary Wisnovsky who represented the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and greeted Hanne Verheyen who had brought back from Germany the Heckscher Essays^*; she had baked a cake and she offered WSH an ivy wreath which he wore part of he time; Mabyana van Lohuizen had come all the way from Holland with a medal made by Charlotte van Pallandt, the great Dutch sculptress; Mabje handed the medal to WSH at the end of a witty speech. Chuck Parkhurst (formerly National Gallery of Art in Washington) also spoke and so did Agnes, Martin Ostwald (coprisoner of WSH in Canada); Jack Martin spoke - the party was designed as a surprise party; a by-product of this decision was that Heckscher had a hell of a time pronouncing the to be expected thank-you remarks. He spoke as follows:

Needless to say, I am grateful to all who have made the effort and who have brought the sacrifice to be here this evening. There are also friends whom Fate prevented from coming and among them are, of course, those who have departed this earth. I don't want to intone a detailed roll-call of those whom we remember with love and devotion but shall name Pan, Millard Meiss, Peter Janson and now - to our great sadness - Rens Lee! - This is also the year in which my belovèd mother-in-law^**, Roxanne's mother and Charlotte's grandmother, died; I can hear her voice saying: ‘vil'jam, jaa, close behind me!’ - I do wish to single out my sister Lottie, two years older than me, who held a protective and, what is more important, corrective hand over me, all my life. When I was four/five years old, I said to Lottie: ‘Lottie, you are a dream which I am dreaming. I may wake up any moment - and you are gone.’ Lottie's reply: ‘You are right Bübing; I am not even your sister. Ich bin dem Teufel aus der Kiepe gesprungen.’ This then was one of the miriad secrets Lottie and I shared in the dreamworld we created for ourselves. I am sure, I am not alone with a basso continuo feeling - which is particularly strong this evening - that I know that I am I - (in the words of the thirteenth century bishop of Ely: gratia Dei sum qui sum) and, besides, that the World is a dream - la vida es suen̄o.

Since I have reached my anecdotage, allow me to refer to two episodes in my life which might be of value because they are at an almost inreacheable distance to most.

+ De kunsthistoricus William S. Heckscher vierde op 12 december 1984 in Princeton zijn tachtigste verjaardag. Voor vrienden en bekenden schreef hij ‘Testimonials to Anecdotage’. Het leek ons een goed idee deze feestelijke documenten te publiceren. Hij ging daarmee accoord. (Red.)

* Edited with an introduction by Egon Verheyen s.t. Art and Literature; Studies in Relationship (Verlag Valentin Koerner), 1985

** Pailadzou Tutunjian Sanossian (1894-April 18, 1984)

Anecdote I:

When I was ten, WW I broke out and a time of seeming peace and limitless happiness came crashing down. Times of near Ethiopian hunger and great anxiety were ahead. Few people even know now that Hamburg (our home town) was threatened by a cloud of phosgene gas - the same stuff Union Carbide produced in India (Bhopal), and that a mere chance made the

[p. 4]

Bronze medal by Charlotte van Pallandt. ‘Never Failing Assistance’ (Motto: Andrea Alciati, Emblem CLXII)

cloud drift southward, across the Lüneburger Heide, where it killed a thousand sheep (and, probably, a few shepherds).

When I was twelve and already affected by hunger, I spent some time in the city of Greifswald at the Baltic Sea, where I was sent to restore my strength, when three (3) amazing things happened to me, more or less simultaneously:

One: I became an ardent anti-militarist

Two: I turned anti-monarchist, and

Three: I foresook Religion.

My inner revolt to nationalism and militarism for their own sake, is unabating. Yet, WW II taught me that absolute Pacifism (and Pacificism that isn't absolute doesn't exist) was foolish. When I became a citizen of Canada (and a British subject, at the height of WW II), I took my oath of allegiance to king George VIth with gusto, and when I became a civil servant in the Netherlands, I was equally proud to pledge my loyalty to Queen Juliana (with whom I had gone to school in The Hague).

I can visualize the episode in the summer of 1916: I was sitting on the sturdy branch of an apple tree in the garden of the Greifswald house where I lived, busily memorizing Martin Luther's Catechism, when my friend Hübschmann and I came to the passage: ‘Ihr seid das Salz der Erde,’ followed by Luther's unfailing question: ‘Was ist das?’ - I simply no longer cared what it meant, threw my Catechism on the ground and jumped off my tree with a strange new feeling of relief and liberation from pressures that had been imposed upon my soul by an alien outside force. I could now hear myself say: ‘Thank God, I'm an agnostic.’ (The salt of the earth occurs only in the gospel of Matthew at the end of the eight beatitudes on which Betsy Sears wrote her Masters Thesis at Yale in 1976).

When at the end of the summer of 1916 I came home to Hamburg, I hugged the conversation at the dinner-table, spouting forth my newly acquired philosophy, condemning Kaiser Wilhelm, declaring that the war was lost, and adding that I refused to be confirmed in the Protestant Faith. My father, who at times would refer to himself in the third person, like Julius Caesar, said: ‘Wilhelm, your father wants to talk to you after dinner.’ What he had to say was astonishing, at least to me: ‘I have absolute respect for everything you said, as long as you don't expect me to agree with your views. You are free to state what you believe with such fervor - aber bitte nicht vor den Dienstboten’ ‘.....but please, not in front of the servants.’ - Some time later, he engaged for me a student of Theology who tutored me in Comparative History of Religion - an unforgettable experience, in the course of which I learned a bit more about the deeper meaning of the salt of the earth!

Anecdote II:

I fled from Nazi Germany in 1936 and went straight to Princeton and spent the next 15 years in both England and North-America. When I first saw Europe again after WW II, it was 1950. I visited England at the invitation of Fritz Saxl to be on a Warburgian Nachleben Committee. And I wrote to Hully, my mother, who was in Hamburg, saying that I would love to see her on this occasion in London. 1950 meant: Korea was just round the corner, The War had ended and Hitler had vanished forever - or had he?! The amiable travesty of the Nuremburg Trials had created the illusion of ‘justice done,’ while in reality the old Nazi intellectuals I had got to know so well - the vicious, dangerous, ruthless, shrewd people who had cleverly not chosen to join the Party, were being catapulted upward, into positions higher than those they had held at the beginning of WW II. I simply wasn't ready yet to go back to Germany. - Henry, who is in our midst this evening, was a better Son. He was stationed in Berlin when War ended and the first thing he did was to fill his army jeep with canned goods and drive from Berlin to Hamburg, to find out if Hulda Heckscher was still alive. It turned out that she was. Henry found her in an

[p. 5]

unheated attic where son and mother were reunited. Soon there was a knock at the door. An officer, member of the British Army of Occupation, asked Henry to identify himself and said to him: ‘You ought to know better - fraternizing with a German woman.’ Henry replied: ‘Not fraternizing, Sir, filializing.’ That ended the military confrontation between British and American occupation forces.

I had sent my letter of invitation to Hully and, in reply, received a message from a surgeon at one of Hamburg's hospitals. It said that my Frau Mutter was unable to travel, having undergone a serious operation. - When I arrived in Hamburg, Hully's hospital offered a peaceful scene. The head nurse told me that Frau Heckscher was taking a walk. Behind the hospital there was a spacious park with winding lanes. There must have been at least fifty old ladies dressed in black who perambulated, leaning on their canes or on the arms of friends. Greatly puzzled, I finally narrowed down my search to two ladies and simply stopped them by blocking their path. The shorter of the two pointed at me with her cane and said: ‘Wer ist dieser Mensch?’ ‘Who is this creature?’ It was, unmistakably, my mother's voice. Her companion said: ‘Das ist doch Dein Sohn, Heinrich.’ My mother: ‘Pfui! so sieht er nicht aus!’ Thus were mother Hulda and son Wilhelm reunited after fifteen eventful years.

I have lived eight decades. What I have learned, is quickly and proudly recorded:

I am a trained gardener - who hates plants and nature with a vengeance/

I am a trained nurse/

I am a diplomated motor-mechanic (vintage 1939 London)/

I specialized, for three and a half years, in stoking industrial kettles/

Professor Martin Ostwald and I learned during WW II in imprisonment to make our beds military fashion /

I have worked at 20 ¢ an hour in a prison factory knitting socks for our glorious troops - not, I hasten to add, the entire sock; heels were knitted by another workman and subsequently conjoined with my product by a third.

Those, you will have to admit, are spectacular accomplishments. However, to do justice to historical veracity I think I should also confess to my utter débâcles:

In 1922 I was rejected by the French Foreign Legion . Rumour told us that they actually had hot food twice a day while we were badly undernourished (my only hot meal during my first year as a workman had been soup made of the bones of an anemic dog). The agents of the Foreign Legion came at night into Saxony driving across the Czechoslovakian border in their high-powered automobiles in search of suitable candidates and they did this on paydays when we were supposed to lie drunk in ditches (we had prepared ourselves by singing: ‘Vive la mort! vive la guerre! vive la Légion Étrangère’).

Just imagine, if they hadn't declared me a weakling (in language which was not flattering): I would now not be here but, having been kissed on both cheeks by the bearded Minister of Defence, I would be in the Bois de Boulogne - a retired général - sitting in a café, sipping my absinthe.

In the later 1940's I was considered for an assistant professorship at Duke University. Professor Katherine Gilbert (whom I deeply admired as the author of the best book on the History of Aesthetics), then chairman of the department of art, attended my lecture at the Frick and remarked (while everybody was listening), that my paper stank, that I was nothing

[p. 6]

but an ape of Panofsky whom she utterly disliked.

Once in my life I summoned all my courage and applied to the Guggenheim Foundation to be turned down cold.

In the 1950's I was offered a delicate seventeenth or early eighteenth century ivory figure of a naked woman who was obviously pregnant (in fact you could look into her womb and see the ‘homo in posse,’ the curled up embryo); the price was 40 Dutch guilders. Darling Mary said: ‘Dope you know, we can't afford it.’ Three weeks later, the self-same figurine fetched $ 4,500.00.

But let me not end on a note of limitless self-commiseration. Let me rather say, if somewhat lamely, that it seems to be a worth-while experience to reach Old Age. In the words of my late-lamented friend: Léon Trotsky, ‘old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to man.’ The Jews, by no means sentimentalists, refer to the eightieth birthday as gevuroth - ie. ‘Strength’ for which I thank Mal Diamond.

I try to console myself by thinking that Cato, at the age of eighty, learned Greek. And I recall that the Astronomer and Mathematician Wilhelm August Foerster at eighty learned to ride a bicycle. In 1912, Foerster went alone on a sightseeing tour of the United States. At one point during his peregrinations, he stayed on Staten Island, the guest of a lady-sculptor who portrayed horses for their rich owners, and fell in love, not with the horses, but with the sculptress.

And now I think, I have exhausted you and my topic. Amen

Galeapetonis Sepiforficis oratiuncula habita sub tutela
Elisabeth Langsford ex tribu Searsium quondam discipula - nunc magistra - semper amica
14 December 1984
14 December 1904

As we try to assess the quality of wines we may also assess human beings in terms of vintage years. Lucky people may be born on significant days which occur in an annus mirabilis; 1340 / 1493 / 1531 / 1632 are good examples of such fruitful and exciting years. As the twentieth century gains momentum, 1904 forms part of a chain of years which politically, technically, socially bring exciting novelties. Philosophy and Theology are at a relatively low ebb. The study of History benefits by the solid work done by giants in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Modern Art begins to assume its classical form. There are interesting transitions in everyday life: automobiles become more functional and that is serviceable; gaslight yields to electricity; the tonneage of ships increases; vicious wars are being fought (Russo-Japanese and colonial in South-West Africa) but somehow the illusion of perpetual times of Peace prevails in Western Europe. The great disillusion is just round the corner - a decade later. The vintage 1904 babies grow up in the post WW I period. To see what has happened to them we may turn up to the year 1920 when, at fifteen / sixteen, intellectual life - along with puberty - starts developing. What used to be events of everyday life (significantly Sigmund Freud published his Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1904) can - 80 years later - be seen as historical events. The anecdotage has begun and what once seemed to be a film running its course can now be seen as ‘stills’ that can be studied at leisure. With the help of a few useful publications of recent years and the chronological system cultivated by WSH we can assemble with relative ease data on 1904, on the 14th of December, and on the year 1920. Herewith our selective offering:

Sources: Werner Stein, Kulturfahrplan, Bln. 1946 (Engl. Time-Tables of History) / Neville Williams, Chronology of the Modern World. 1763 to the Present Time, London, 1966 / Robert Collinson (Society of Indexers), Dictionary of Dates, London, 1962.

1904

Political

February 4th (-1905) Russo-Japanese War; as early as August, the Russian Fleet is crippled at Port Arthur

The German Army suppresses with enormous violence and cruelty an uprising of Hottentots and other native tribes in South-West Africa

Teddy Roosevelt: U.S. President

Entente Cordiale: France-England

Tibet invaded by the British

France withdraws its ambassador from the Vatican.

Successful bill introduced in France, ending the Concordat of 1801, resulting in separation of Church and State

Rosa Luxemburg disputes the authority of Lenin of a centralistic party organization

Jean Jaurès founds L'Humanité

Technical:
(scientific / ‘progress’)

The automobile: in 1904 it is about 18 years old / The great name: Daimler (1886) / Britain has the

[p. 7]

first motor fire engine (postal stamp commemorated) / December 1904: F.H. Royce joins forces with Charles Rolls resulting in Erwin Panofsky's ‘Idealogical Antecedents of the Rolls-Royce Radiator’, American Philosophical Society Vol. 107. 1963, 273-288; also: Gerhard Woeckel, ‘The Spirit of Ecstasy’. Die Rolls-Royce Autokühlerfigur von Charles Sykes, Alte und Moderne Kunst, 1970, 108 / 109, pp. 19-27; 24-31 / London introduces the Double Decker Bus

4 May 1904 digging of the Panama Canal begins The Wright Brothers fly their motorized plane around corners

Wireless messages are sent by German troops during the So-W. African battles

M. Welte & Söhne perfects piano-rolls

Anschütz-Kaempfe produces the Gyro-Compass (Kreisel Kompass)

J.P.L.T. Elster: the Photo-Electric cell

Parachute descent from Aircraft by Berry (good old Berry!)

Ferrie Bramanti (Florence) told WSH that her father (W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp) introduced the first bicycle to the Island of Bali; it was represented in shallow relief at Koeboetambahan (in the temple of Poera Medoewekarang which in 1917 was destroyed by an earthquake); the relief was reconstructed from hear-say at a later date where the wheels were replaced by lotus flowers; cf. W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp, Een florentijnsche Villa, p. 52

Oesenberg Burial Ship: discovered (it dates from ca. 850)

(for the Panama Canal, 1904-1914) cf. Ian Cameron, The Impossible Dream, Hodden & Stoughton, 1972

In 1904 a German engineer (Christian Hülsmeyer) built a Radio Echo device to prevent ship collisions. Nobody was interested

Dr. Ludwig Roselius (Bremen) the physician and coffee-taster deviced decaffeination of coffee

Neon-Lights invented - models at the United States National Bureau of Standards

Bayer Agfa and Badisische Anilin are combined by Carl Duisberg into IG Farben Industry

Offset Printing invented

The Ultra Violet lamp

Music sent by wireless (Graz)

The Safety Razor Blade invented

New York's subway opens at Broadway

Rutherford's general Theory of Radioactivity

Mme. Curie, Recherches sur les substances radioactives

Medicine:

(Psychopathology listed elsewhere)

Dr. Ottmar Rosenbach, Physician versus Bacteriologist New York-London, 1904 = philosophical basis for Immunology stated

Hermann Swoboda, Die Perioden des menschlichen Lebens in ihrer psychologischen und biologischen Bedeutung, Leipzig & Vienna, 1904 i.e. biorhythmical theories developed

[p. 8]

Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov, awarded the Nobel Prize of 1904 for his work Die Arbeit der Verdauungsdrüsen (1898 German translation of the Russian original of 1897)

Synthetic Adrenalin produced by Stolz

Einthoven invents the Electrocardiograph

Siamese Twins (they were in reality Chinese Twins) separated and survive one miserable year (died with dignity in each others arms)

May 1904 Measle Epidemic in Iceland; cf. Andrew Cliff & Peter Haggett, ‘Island Epidemics’, Scientific American, May 1984 (sic!), pp. 138-147

Propagation of the Eel, explained in full by Johann Schmidt of Copenhagen; J.S., on the research ship ‘Thor’, had caught the larvae of an eel (Leptocephalus brevirostri (off the Faraoes)); but note: in 1777, Mondini, at Bologna, identified the ovaries of a female eel and in 1874, Syraki, a Polish naturalist, found a sexually mature eel, (male); cf. Denys Jucker, Nature, 21 February 1959 / Léon Bertin, Eels, London, 1956

Social / economic / philosophical:

1904 Year of the Dragon in the Buddhist Cycle Nobel Prize for Peace

Religious school-teaching suppressed in France Ominous rumblings: Germany founds the Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie (including: Rassen- und Gesellschaftshygiene)

(Nov 2 1904) Criminals are being finger-printed in a U.S. penitentiary (Leavenworth, Ky.)

Danish Law introduces lashings for crimes of violence (Britain already has anniversarybeatings of brutal criminals which, unfortunately, were abolished)

In New York, Police arrest a woman for smoking in public

(in 1909 WSH saw for the first time a woman smoking a cigarette from a cigaret holder; it was Frau Reinhold Lepsius; her guest was Stefan George, Ahornallee Berlin West)

The German anti-Jesuit law of 1872 is partly lifted

10-hr. workday is introduced in France

Prostitution: The fight against white slavery (Mädchenhandel) gains momentum; cf. 1904 publications: B. Schidlof, Der Mädchenhandel, seine Geschichte und sein Wesen: J. Schrank, Der Mädchenhandel und seine Bekämpfung

Related: Children used in Industry; Italian children were sold to France; The International Association for the Protection of Children, founded - this leads, in America, to the Mann Act of the year 1910 which, in the 1930's was mostly used for blackmail

1904 sees the first great Economic Crisis in the United States

The 1904 World Exhibition in St. Louis combined with the first American Olympic Games

Legendary firsts: 1904 sees the first evidence of fast food (‘the American Tragedy’): A.) The Hot-Dog; first appears in a cartoon of 1904 by T.A. Dorgan and is mysteriously associated with the New York Polo Grounds; the St. Louis, Mo. Fair results in B.) The Hamburger and C.) the first Ice Cream Cone

Domesting Lighting by gas; Streetcars drawn by horses;

The great event is that the Corset looses its absolute rulership - its last residue: the bra: consequently the female figure conforms to a new ideal of natural curves

Stieglitz, ‘The Steerage’ (Common Sense if applied to History being Nonsense) shows aliens departing from the United States (= seasonal workers); a steamboat trip Hamburg-New York cost $ 10

Helen Keller gets a B.A. at Radcliffe (a multiple triumph)

Probably the most impressive philosophical work published in 1904: Windelband, Ueber Willensfreiheit

Sigmund Freud, Die Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (Psychopathology of Everyday Life) Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism (an immortal work)

Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter (1903) first known in 1904; every schoolboy read Weininger in the 1920's - a work that is now practically unknown; the author committed suicide at the age of 23

Cultural:

Frobenius, Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes in 2 vols.

Eduard Meyer (1855-1930), Aegyptische Chronologie, Berlin, 1904

Archer M. Huntington (d. 1955) founds The Hispanic Society of America

H. Smidt, Ein Jahrhundert römischen Lebens, Leipzig, 1904 (an anthology)

Literary events:

Literature

Albert Bielschowsky, Goethe in 2 vols. (ed. ultima:) Munich, 1904 (A.B. had died in 1902) James Joyce, Dubliners; finished in its first version; printed, however, 19 years later; one of its stories, ‘Mr. Bloom's Day in Dublin’, was taken out and appeared in Paris as Ulysses (1922) 16 June 1904 Ulysses = the day on which the plot develops in less than 24 hrs.

Baroque Revival: Arno Holz (1863-1929), Dafnis. Lyrisches Porträt aus dem 17. Jahrhundert (revised: 1924)

[p. 9]

Romain Rolland (1866-1943), Jean-Christophe

Montague R. James, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (best ghost stories ever)

Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts

Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

Jack London, The Sea-Wolf

George Bernard Shaw: Archibald Henderson (1877-1963), North Carolina mathematician (friend of Mark Twain and student of Albert Einstein) asked, in 1904, Shaw to appoint him his official biographer (Shaw called him ‘the Grand Panjandrum’ (see Brewers))

Fritzi Massary (a soubrette and femme fatale), flourishes in Berlin

Stage

G. Puccini, ‘Madam Butterfly’ performed in Milan

‘Peter Pan’ produced with the sets by William Nicholson of J.M. Barrie's work; in the titlerole Nina Boucicault

Unser Wilhelm Shakespeare invades the German stage with a vengeance:

(a.) ‘Pericles’ (Sh's most unjustly neglected play = Patience - the raging Sea - Incest - emblematical devices - magic revival of the dead - from dissonance to the music-of-the-spheres - one of the marvellous late, fading-out plays; best analysis by Hoeninger (Arden Shakespeare)) appears on the German stage, prepared by E. von Possart; cf. Shakespeare Jahrbuch, XVII, 209 and XLI, 308

(b.) the first great revival of Sh's ‘Troilus and Cressida’ on the Berlin stage (London, not before: 1907)

Luigi Pirandello, Il fu Mattia Pascal

Wedekind, Die Büchse der Pandora

Anton Chekhov dies; his last play appears in 1904: ‘The Cherry Orchard’

Linguistic

Word-Association formulated: by C.G. Jung, Experimental Researches, vol. II of J's Collected Works (Bollingen Series XX; 2,) 1973

Gustav Roethe, issues, for the Akademie der Wissenschaften (Bln.), German mediaeval texts (in 44 vols. 1953)

Linguistic Atlas of France (dialects)

Vereinsverband akademisch gebildeter Lehrer in Deutschland; an association of philologists

‘Comparative Literature’ born; cf. Fernand Baldensperger (nomina sunt omina), Goethe en France (later sub-titled: ‘orientations étrangères’ = 1927; the manifest of the new approach Otto Gradenwitz' marvellous forward and backward Latin Dictionary for palaeographical work, s.t. Laterculi

A rare triumph: Four-letter words appear in print = I.B. de Kurtene in his revised and enlarged edition of Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl (1801-1872) An Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great-Russian Language (needless to say: omitted once more under the Sovjet authorities)

Art:

The Sphinx of Aigina discovered

R. Herzog concludes his excavations of the Asklepeion on the Island of Cos

Heures de Jean duc de Berry: destroyed in a fire in the Turin Library

André Derain buys an African mask from Maurice de Vlaminck; Matisse and Picasso see the mask in D's atelier; it is ‘la première pièce d'art nègre qui a influencé l'art contemporain’; cf. Wm. Fagg and Margaret Plass, African Sculpture, London and New York, 1964, p. 11 (illus.) Picasso newly settled in Paris

Primitives are in the air: 1904 is the year when ‘Primitifs Français’ are exhibited in Paris; cf. Émile Mâle, ‘La miniature à l'exposition des Primitifs français’, Gazette-des-Beaux-Arts, 3^e s., XXXII 1904, 41-60

Rodin exhibition at Düsseldorf: in 1904 he creates ‘Le Penseur’

Max Liebermann (1847-1935; he had his studio at the Brandenburg Gate and said, when Hitler came to power, ‘Man kann garnicht soviel freßen wie man kotzen möchte’) paints the portrait of Wilhelm von Bode (Liebermann was visited in his atelier by a young man and his girlfriend on the way to a party; the young man had burned a hole in the pants of his dinner jacket; Liebermann took his brush and painted, the skin shining through, the hole black; he said to the young man, ‘Jetzt sind Sie ein echter Liebermann’)

Gainsborough's most beautiful painting, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Robert Andrews’ appears out of nothing; it was, however, first publicly shown in 1927; in 1960 it was sold to Thos. Agnews & Sons, Ltd. for £ 30,000 (highest price up to

[p. 10]

then fetched by this kind of work); it was between 1748 and 50 when G. was ± 21-23 years old, that G. completed this composition

Microscope influences Art Nouveau; cf. Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur, mit Supplement, Leipzig-Vienna, 1899-1904 in elf Lieferungen. Mit 1002 teils farbigen Tafeln; see e.g. Pieter Singelenberg, Berlage, pp. 135f.

Museum turns into a prestige and financialclout institution: J. Pierpont Morgan becomes President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (until 1913); initial date: 21 November 1904. J.P.M. gives 8,000 items to the Museum; in 1904 the food served in the Metropolitan was famous; indecency was piled on indecency when the Museum started asking for entrance fees and when clowns in uniform urged visitors not to stay ‘too long’ in front of a given work of art

Franz von Lenbach paints the German great Salvador Dali born

Max Beerbohm does his series of drawings of writers s.t. ‘Poets Corner’

Two significant art historical Studies (i.) Max Dvořak, Das Rätsel der Kunst der Brüder van Eyck; (ii.) Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (laying stress on French Impressionism)

First great Matisse Exhibition in Paris

Henri Rousseau, ‘The Wedding’

Isadora Duncan (1887-1927) introduces the classical-inspired dance

Biographical:

(a.) Biographies of the year 1904

Anton Dvorak, the composer, dies

H.M. Stanley, the Africa explorer, dies

Lafcadio Hearn dies; his last work a beautiful assessment of Japan

Cecil Beaton⁰

John Gielgud born at the Old Brompton Road; his m., Kate Terry, was a sister of the famous Ellen

Anton Chekhov dies at the age of 44

27 December Marlene Dietrich⁰

(b.) Biographies and historical events that can be dated on 14 December (including 1904 - meagre!)

St. Spiridion a fourth century bishop of Tremithus = patron saint of WSH; for his portrait, cf. Menologium of Basilius II (Vatican Library); Spiridion was a Cypriot shepherd. Robbers who tried to rob him of his sheep were stayed by an invisible hand. Spiridion finding them next morning in utter despair, set them free with his prayers and gave them one ram ‘lest they should have been up all night for nothing’.

Under Diocletian Spiridion was condemned to work in the mines; patron saint of robbers and prisoners; died ca. 348, his title: ‘Confessor of the Faith’

Blessed Berthold of Ratisbone, died on 14 December 1272; his main merit seems to have been an indomitable urge to wander from one country to another

God only knows who Bartolo Buompedi was; he died on 14th of December 1300; his merit: he lost a toe which was miraculously restored

On December 14 1363 Joannes Charlier was born at Gerson nr. Rheims; chancellor of the University of Paris; doctor christianissimus

On 14 December 1417 Sir John Oldcastle was hanged; he is said to have been Shakespeare's prototype for Fallstaff

14 December 1466 Donato di Nicollo di Berto Bardi dies at the age of 80 (some prefer the 13th of December)

14 December 1491 Lucas Rem was born; a distinguished writer of a Tagebuch; Rem was a well-to-do merchant at Augsburg; educated in Venice

Michael Nostradamus, born 14 December 1503, remained uncircumcised although of Jewish parentage; famed for his prophecies

On 14 December 1521 Erasmus writes his first letter to Andrea Alciati (Allen 1250)

On this day in 1542 King James Vth of Scotland dies

On this day in 1546 Tycho Brahe, the astronomer, was born

In 1553 Henri IV of France

On 14 December 1777 the Spanish poet Juan Nicasio Gallego was born (d. 1853)

On 14 December 1788 Carl Philip Emanuel Bach died - since he was left-handed, Johann Sebastian considered his son a cripple, and refused to teach him, with the happy result that Philip Emanuel was free to anticipate Mozart and Schubert in his non-contrapuntal compositions

14 December 1795 Wolfgang von Goethe maligns Jean Paul Friedrich Richter by saying: ‘Uebrigens sind gegenwärtig die Hundsposttage das Werk worauf unser feineres Publikum seinen Ueberfluß an Beifall ergiesst; ich wünschte, daß der arme Teufel in Hof (where Jean Paul lived) bei diesen traurigen Wintertagen etwas Angenehmes davon empfände’

14 December 1799 George Washington dies

On this day in 1800, Jean Paul begins his fantastic novel Des Luftschiffers Gianozzo Seebuch

On this day in 1807, Jean Paul starts a long series of book reviews

Puvis de Chavannes born on 14 December 1824 The Royal Consort, Prince Albert of Coburg dies on this day in the year 1861

14 December 1895, King George VIth born

14 December 1904 Women first voted in a General Election in Britain

On this day in 1911 Amundsen reached the

[p. 11]

South Pole

On this day in 1917 Cuba declares war on Austria

On this day in 1971 the Leonides meteor shower count reached a rate of 50 per hour on the early morning sky

14 December 1952 the Siamese Twins are separated

We interviewed W.S. Heckscher concerning his intellectual activities in the year 1920 when he attended the Nederlandsch Lyceum in The Hague, along with a number of Dutch classmates who were born in 1903/04. He presented us with the following reply typed on his Remington Noiseless of the year 1920 (a gift from his grateful parents for not having failed a school-year).

We read voraciously and discussed what we had read among each other; nothing in this regard we did was done ‘for credit’. The best I can do is set down a list of books we read as they come to mind. Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Schweijk - possibly the best book that had come out of WW I / unfortunately, the time for the great English Spanish Farm Trilogy (1914-1918) by R.H. Mottram, which did not appear before 1924, had yet to come nor could we have known Sir Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man / My mother made me read Olive Schreiner, Stories from an African Farm / Rudolf Steiner was to us inaccessible - quite possibly because we looked upon Goethe (Steiner's Goetheanum) with misgivings / Aunt Martha (who was a Roman-Catholic) gave me Romano Guardini, The Spirit of Liturgy / One of the deepest impressions was left by Oswald Spengler's Untergang des Abendlandes which was just appearing (1919-22); with all its faults, I still think of it as a miracle book (Spengler's analysis of music, of colours, of portraits, of life models) / We devoured Strindberg in the German translation by Schering / While adoring Freud, we deeply respected Adler and intentionally by-passed Jung / My personal Favorite was Karl Liebknecht, Militarismus und Antimilitarismus / We read Albert Schweitzer's theological writings / Anatole France L'Ile des pingoins, as most of his writings, was an experience quite unbelievable / Being young, we had our ‘black-white’ likes and dislikes: we despised Ibsen and we considered R.M. Rilke ‘for women’, while Hermann Hesse was unappetitlich / I hated Cézanne de tout mon coeur and Richard Wagner gave me vicious migraine headaches / We missed out on George Bernard Shaw and, alas, on Oscar Wilde / we were amused by Timmermans, Pallieter, but mainly because our elders considered it ‘indecent’ (the hero, waiting for his girlfriend, pisses her name in the snow) / we assumed that Vondel was a great poet and dramatist / We laughed at Mary Wigman, and any form of dancing with bare feet which we found embarrassing / We studied and discussed Thomas à Kempis, Imitatio Christi and memorised Angelus Silesius, Der Cherubinische Wandersmann (1657), although we were at that time vociferous atheists / We studied Perspective and Human Anatomy - I was privileged to draw from live nude models / Of course we had our regular school lessons so that we studied language and literature which meant we could handle Dutch, Greek, Latin, French, German, English with some ease; the bright ones who wanted to be Erasmian homines trilingues took Hebrew voluntarily / With all this, Search for Identity did not exist / All our teachers (none of them interested in acting loco parentis or forming our characters) had Ph.D.'s; they naturally published at least once a year; the majority was academic teachers (when I was a full professor and cathedraticus at Utrecht, I met my old Greek teacher, David D. Cohen, who was only an associate professor; which schoolboy...); on the whole we kept away from our teachers and vice versa... they arrived, lectured, departed / we were not held responsible for pages 13 to 18 (‘but you may omit notes 13 through 15’); rather knowledge was taken for granted / We were the élite; if we failed in one subject, we could loose an entire year, and if we didn't do well after that, we were asked to leave school (which meant permanent banishment from all Dutch and Belgian highschools) / No one would dream of frequenting prostitutes; if lucky, we were seduced by older women; as far as I remember, we didn't have sexual problems / Nervous breakdowns were not as yet in fashion / We were on the whole quite healthy, mainly because we despised sports and athletic prowess (I remember that we didn't speak to one in our midst who had excelled in some Olympic competition) / Competitive sports were for the lower classes, policemen, workers, streetcar conductors, soldiers, i.e. the strict non-thinkers; those classes we addressed as ‘je’, we tipped them, and they called us ‘U’ / We spent most of our vacations in tents (camping grounds had yet to be invented: we negotiated with peasants); our tents were light-weight and could easily be carried on our bicycles; they were made of discarded WW I Zeppelin skins; we baked our own bread and we lived frugally; what we did take along, was a vast library; what we read we discussed on a high level; we were fortunate in being the pregossip generation / Our views were divergent but we were united in one respect: we were anti-authority; but as I recall, we were not disrespectful: Queen Wilhelmina (author of an

[p. 12]

amazing old-age book: Eenzaam maar niet alleen) we regarded with utmost admiration because she had refused to extradite Wilhelm II. (Who was her ‘guest’ at Castle Doorn); in this refusal she and her prime minister Colijn were true representatives of Holland's great legal tradition in international law; we had read Hugo Grotius De iure belli ac pacis libri tres, Amsterdam (Johannes Blaeu), 1646 - the first old book I owned (tough going!) / We were thus imbued with the values of humanism and humanity for which the present age has substituted ‘Western Values’ and that is to say ideologies based on emotions not on thought; we worshipped England and the British spirit (as we saw it), not for sentimental reasons (‘to be British is a form of neurosis’ said my closest friend van Stipriaan, not without envy) and not for reasons of power politics or geopolitics / One thing we were not: brain-washed; we reserved the right to come - each individually - to our own judgments.

P.S. My closest friends were Broos van der Does de Bye (who as a judge at Leiden (jeugdrechter) had extensively dealt with the ill-famed van der Lubbe who, under Goering's supervision, had laid fire to the Reichstags building in Berlin) / Willem baron van Haersolte (who ran Holland's largest law-office in Amsterdam with some 50 lawyers working under him) / Jan Verkade (nephew of a famous Dutch actor and director of the Verkade factories in Zaandam which produced kookies and chocolate) / finally Arnout van Stipriaan - Luiscius Bungenberg de Jong (who, a psychoanalist, had lain on the Master's couch in Vienna; he was one of those men of genius who leave no trace of their existence behind; when the Germans invaded Holland (May 1940), Arnout committed suicide); the three others died of natural causes after the unavoidable ‘long illnesses’.

P.P.S. Art History was prominent in my existence; since I was allergic to Mathematics, I spent those class-hours in the Royal Library near our Lyceum and read Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente. Lottie and I stood hand in hand in front of Rembrandt's ‘Anatomy of Dr. Tulp’ and were puzzled. Our Lyceum Debating society invited outside speakers. My great Erlebnis came when Willem Vogelzang (cathedraticus in Utrecht) lectured to us with slides on ‘Modern Art’ - Picasso, Matisse, Despiau. At that moment a window opened to a newly found world: the cultural-historical approach to works of art.