#buddenbrooks energy

[leninqrad]

I am completely enamoured with this book cover, admire it!

[dodger-chan]

Tag who you want to catch up with/get to know better!

Tagged by @sthound

Last Song: Day Dream by D

Last Film: Um, probably Ninotchka, actually. I love movies, I should watch them more.

Currently Reading: ah, yes, this is where my free time goes.

Dracula, as part of Dracula Daily

Moby Dick, as part of Whale Weekly

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, as part of a tumblr book club

The Woman in White by Wilke Collins, yet another tumblr book club

Just finished How To Raise An Elephant, the 21st (of I think 23) book of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series

Also just finished The Flag and The Cross, a book about the history of Christian nationalism in America

Just started (but am already about 1/3 of the way through) When The Angels Left The Old Country by Sacha Lamb (it's not quite Good Omens but Jewish, but I can see why that's the elevator pitch)

Not yet started, but just picked up from the library today, Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska

(no wonder I haven't seen a movie in months)

Currently watching: Nothing, actually. My spouse and I watched the last season of that Jack Ryan show (the CIA is not allowed to do pretty much any of that, but they're probably doing it and worse) and haven't started a new show since. Probably won't until Our Flag Means Death puts out season two.

Current obsession: I'm working on a '40s Stranger Things au, but it's really more of a fifteen page (so far) Raymond Chandler pastiche/love letter to The Long Goodbye featuring Eddie Munson as Philip Marlowe and Steve Harrington as kind of Terry Lennox.

Tagging (no pressure, ofc): @threewaywithdelusion @big-urchin-energy @tinyyellowflowers-blog @tony-buddenbrook @nico-di-angelfish and @sharpbutsoft

[i-can-even-burn-salad]

From the book ask game, if you've still got the energy!

- Can you name a book that kept you up at night?

- What’s your least favorite book?

- Do you have a favorite quote from any of the books you read?

Thank you for the ask! Something something this ask game.

I mean, I didn't have the energy in the first place, but I only need to live another day, then the heatwave is over! :D

- Can you name a book that kept you up at night?

Carol Berg's Transformation led to irresponsible bedtime decisions. By which I mean, it was at least 4am.

- What’s your least favorite book?

Probably half of those we had to read in school. The only one I actually never read, and never even made it through the audiobook, was Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. Biggest DNF ever.

- Do you have a favorite quote from any of the books you read?

What sticks with me are scenes or vibes, and I'm really bad at quotes :') So, no.

[dummerjan]

Tag 9 people you want to get to know better!

tagged by @theoryofarson – thank you <333 Three ships Kim/Chay is my main one right now, they make me feel so much. I've listened to some Sterek podfics recently and yep, Sterek is still eternal. Never letting them go, no way. KP is just a momentary distraction. Sterek has everything I also love about other ships. Martino and Niccolò from Skam Italia, it's been four years since I first watched their season and they still make me just as happy.

First ever ship I think the very first one I've read fanfiction for is Brian/Justin from QaF US. I must have been 14 and it was a nearly 500k post-canon fic, though I doubt I read all of it. I still have the link but there's no way I'll read smut in German. I was also really into the gay storylines from soaps from all over the world. Maybe one of those came before.

Last Song

And for once I am actually listening to it on a Friday night - that's what the song is about.

Last movie I can't remember, I rarely ever watch movies. The next movie, though, is going to be Two and One with Paolo Pangilinan from Gaya Sa Pelikula. I've wanted to see it since it came out but couldn't legally. I finally found a file for the English subs and a download for the movie, though. So I guess piracy it is? I wanted to give them money, okay? The site just wouldn't let me.

Currently reading Whatever fanfics I am subscribed to and in theory also Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, I like it but it's been a year and I've managed less than 1/3.

Currently Watching Gannibal - I've only got one episode left but I am being a bit of a baby about it. It's scary, ok? I am fine with eating children once a year, I am less fine with keeping them in a cave for years until it's time to eat them. Word of Honor - It took me six months to watch the second episode so who knows how long it will take me to watch the next one, but I like it so far, even though I have no idea what is going on. Just a lot of flirting in front of teenagers, that I got. I am also rewatching the third season of Druck even if that is a slow process.

Currently Consuming Consuming what? Why so unspecific? Food? None. I've eaten too much and now my stomach hurts. Does music count? I am listening to AnnenMayKantereit.

Currently Craving Again, so unspecific. Food? None. Though lately, I have been thinking about dubu-jorim a lot, or rather my spin on it. Maybe I'll make that tomorrow. And once I've eaten fried tofu, I won't stop craving it for a couple weeks. Media? I just want to see Kim one more time, okay? Just once, please, I am begging. I am so unwell about him. Existentially? Hope. A direction in life. Ways to do what I want to do. A win, I could really use a win. Creativity but also the inspiration and energy to follow through. Tagging: @skamskada @scattered-stardust @booksnchocolate @sauerland-2001 @whirling-ghost @stalkerpoetess1995 @caffelattedellequattro @silviakundera @hedgewyse I know that's not nine people but I already get anxious about tagging a single person. I made it! Nine people! I just needed to look at my followers/following lists.

[langernameohnebedeutung]

have you ever read a classic book that you disliked or found boring?

Sure have! - I don’t hold classics to a particular standard anyway. If I don’t like a classic, I will put it aside same as a ‘modern’ book. I like to read them, because I enjoy the stories and if I don’t - yeet, book. There are some things I enjoy about them being classics, like getting an insight into the way a person at that time thought or constructed reality or interpreted the actions of their fellow people, but it also has serious downsides (usually that the way a person at that time thought about reality could be very dehumanising to women, people of colour, Jewish people, etc.). But I also think they get a bad rep for being boring (I blame school). Some of the most boring books I (didn’t) read where modern writers going through the motions to tick all the trope boxes for a modern crime-thriller or fantasy-novel.

That said my biggest: -.- moment with a classic was: I read the Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann in school, which is one of those books people tell you every German has to read. I found it absolutely boring and dull and uninteresting. 

Skip forward, I’m out of school and decide it’s finally time to read Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane (held up to a similar degree). I hated it, hated the characters, hated the pacing, hated that this male author clearly has very little insight into the way a young woman thinks and I realised I hated it for a lot of the same underlying reasons that I didn’t like the Buddenbrooks for. Also the chinese ghost sub-plot and also where did the child constantly go.  I actually felt guilty, because the author was critical about the way society treats young women and asks them to put their own ambitions and hopes aside in order to be a good wife, but I just didn’t vibe with it,

I thought the similarities existed strictly because Buddenbrooks and Briest were both written in the same time period. So I read on and suddenly a guy named ‘Buddenbrook’ makes an appearance. I really wanted to punch a wall when I realised that it all wasn’t a coincidence. Thomas Mann had written the Buddenbrooks based on a character from Effi Briest because he liked that novel so much. Dude really compressed the entire boring energy of Effi Briest. his dislike for the colour yellow and his fear of dentists into a novel and was like: “This is a literary experience the world needs!”

[justforbooks]

Dreamers by Volker Weidermann — all power to the creatives

Is this not miraculous? We have staged a revolution without spilling a drop of blood! There has never been such a thing in history.” So allegedly proclaimed Kurt Eisner, theatre critic and journalist, once jailed for treason, now the self-appointed prime minister of the Free State of Bavaria. In the early hours of November 7-8 1918, Eisner and fellow revolutionaries had taken advantage of a general strike and spreading mutiny by the German navy to stage a popularly supported coup in Munich to overthrow the old order and replace it with a democratic parliamentary republic.

This short lived German revolution would not remain bloodless for long. Violence meted out by the new Communist rulers was eventually quelled by equally savage methods undertaken by the rightwing as it sought to reinstate order. Only a few months later, on February 21 1919, the 51-year-old bohemian Eisner, a “mystic revolutionary”, “a socialist fairytale king” with a beard to rival that of Karl Marx, was assassinated — shot in the back by a German nationalist. His revolution would last until that August, when it would be ended by the adoption of the Weimar Constitution.

Volker Weidermann’s blend of engrossing, urgent reportage and gentle, dissociative musing will be familiar to readers of his previous work, the bestselling Summer Before the Dark, which portrayed, with melancholy and menace, the final summer of frantic friendship between writers Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig in 1936 in the Belgian seaside resort of Ostend, their options decreasing, their lives soon to be destroyed by exile.

Dreamers moves along similar lines: it is both a prequel to and a foreshadowing of the previous work. Weidermann, using a larger cast of characters in a narrative crammed with activity, concentrates on the artists and intellectuals who participated in the revolution and its chaotic aftermath.

They included Expressionist playwright Ernst Toller, president for six days in April 1919, for which he would serve a five-year prison sentence, later committing suicide in exile in New York in 1939, and his close associate Max Weber, the political economist. Weber advised the drafters of the Weimar Constitution shortly before falling victim to the Spanish flu pandemic, dying in 1920.

The movement’s prominent observers included the “silent” “slender, almost transparent” poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and novelist Thomas Mann. Rilke’s most famous work, The Duino Elegies, was still undergoing a long, agonising gestation; his undistinguished war service had been curtailed by the intervention of influential friends. Mann, already author of Buddenbrooks and Death in Venice, not yet the author of The Magic Mountain and Nobel laureate, had supported the Kaiser during the first world war and opposed liberalism. His views shifted gradually but dramatically as a result of the revolution — he encouraged fellow intellectuals to support the fledgling Weimar Republic, later becoming an important critic of Nazism, for which, in limbo in Switzerland, he was stripped of German citizenship by 1936.

The clear intention behind this deceptively extravagant and endlessly interesting book, unerringly translated by Ruth Martin, is to draw a parallel with the surge of populism in a steadily destabilising Europe of 2018. Much as his compatriot and fellow literary editor Florian Illies did with his acclaimed 1913: The Year Before the Storm, Weidermann uses a free, impressionistic style, mixing fact with supposition and actual historical incident with a hint of possibility, a style that is the perfect prose foil for Eisner’s neophyte socialist state.

Eisner’s failed gamble would lead to another Munich-centred coup, the commonly known Beer Hall Putsch of March 1923. Initially unsuccessful, its ultimate outcome would be the national championing and astonishing rise of its principal instigator, Adolf Hitler. But let us not leave the last word to him. Instead, here is an exiled Ernst Toller, visionary of the nascent “writers’ republic”, speaking with energy and conviction nearly 20 years later in London in 1936: “We’ve learnt that ‘fate’ is an excuse. We make fate! We want to be true, we want to be courageous, we want to be human.”

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[nunc2020]

Die Weltunterbrechung

Von Armin Nassehi

Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft hat Weihnachten als große Familieninszenierung erfunden.

Es geschieht etwas mit den Menschen an Weihnachten, dessen sie sich nicht bewusst sind und das daher umso revolutionärer ist. Jenseits von Kommerz und Rausch werden alle auf die Familie zurückgeworfen. Ob das gut geht?

„Wenn die stille Zeit vorbei ist, wird es auch wieder ruhiger“, schrieb der große bayerische Philosoph und Anarchist Karl Valentin. In diesem Satz ist mehr Wahrheit als nur die ironische Aussicht auf etwas Ruhe nach jener stressigen Zeit des Advents, die im kulturellen Gedächtnis eher als stille Zeit gilt – es aber nicht ist. Nun wäre es wohlfeil, in den Kanon derer einzustimmen, denen an Weihnachten vor allem die Hektik auffällt, mit der das 13. Monatsgehalt in die Binnennachfrage zurückgespült wird und mit der ein familiäres Aufrüsten verbunden ist, noch eine Lücke zwischen Fondue und Zimtstern, Glühwein und Lebkuchen oder Gans und Teilchen ausfindig zu machen, um sie möglichst schnell zu schließen.

Die Hektik vor Weihnachten, den Kauf- und Konsumrausch, den Stress von Weihnachtsfeiern, die niemand will, aber fast alle besuchen müssen, kann man kritisieren – als das Uneigentliche, als Ablenkung, als falsches Leben im Falschen. Man wird dafür viel Zustimmung bekommen, als Kopfnicken zwischen zwei Weihnachtseinkäufen oder als solidarischen Seufzer zwischen Hauptgang, Dessert und Kapitalismuskritik bei der Weihnachtsfeier.

Aber wie gesagt, das ist so wohlfeil und erwartbar, dass es schon dazugehört und ja auch keinen wirklichen Leidensdruck erzeugt. Man muss Weihnachten aber viel dialektischer denken. Wäre die stille Zeit, der Advent, wirklich ruhig, würde das Entscheidende an Weihnachten gar nicht auffallen, dass es nämlich tatsächlich ruhiger wird. Karl Otto Hondrich, der unvergessene Frankfurter Soziologe, schrieb zu Weihnachten 2006, kurz vor seinem Tod: „Die Aura der Ruhe schafft es sich durch die Unruhe, mit der es sich umgibt und die es noch steigert – bis es alles zur Ruhe zwingt: die Politik, Wirtschaft, Vergnügen, Sport, sogar die Autos. Am 24. Dezember, zwischen 18 und 20 Uhr, findet eine ganze Gesellschaft ihren absoluten Ruhepunkt.“

In der Tat – alle Systeme außer den absolut lebenswichtigen wie Energie- und Krankenversorgung oder andere Notdienste werden heruntergefahren. Wenigstens das öffentliche Leben wird bis an seine Grenze bradykard. Der Gesellschaftskreislauf wird so weit wie möglich reduziert, und es gelingt tatsächlich für kurze Zeit, dass alles langsamer und ereignisloser wird – zumindest in den öffentlichen Räumen.

Zurückgeworfen, das war die Pointe von Hondrich, wird die Gesellschaft letztlich auf ihre Familien und, so muss man hinzufügen, diejenigen, die keine Familie haben, merken es spätestens jetzt. Hondrich fragt: „Wird da nicht das Falsche gefeiert?“ Nun – wenn alles andere wegfällt, dann bleibt nur die Familie, wie immer sie sei, das ist ihre Funktion: Sie mutet uns eine Nähe zu, die in allen anderen Bereichen der Gesellschaft störend wäre. Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft jedenfalls hat Weihnachten als große Familieninszenierung erfunden. Das Weihnachtskapitel in Thomas Manns „Buddenbrooks“ kann als das Lukasevangelium der familialen Weihnachtsliturgie gelesen werden.

[tilde44]

Typhus runs the following course:      As he lies in remote, feverish dreams, lost in their heat, the patient is called back to life by an unmistakable, cheering voice.  That clear, fresh voice reaches his spirit wandering along strange, hot paths and leads it back to cooling shade and peace.  The patient listens to that bright, cheering voice, hears its slightly derisive admonishment to turn back, to return to the regions from which it calls, to places that the patient has left so far behind and has already forgotten.  And then, if there wells up within him something like a sense of duties neglected, a sense of shame, of renewed energy, of courage, joy, and love, a feeling that he still belongs to that curious, colorful, and brutal hubbub that he has left behind -- then, however far he may have strayed down that strange, hot path, he will turn back and live.  But if he hears the voice of life and shies from it, fearful and reticent, if the memories awakened by its lusty challenge only make him shake his head and stretch out his hand to ward them off, if he flees farther down the path that opens before him now as a route of escape -- no, it is clear, he will die.

Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (John E. Woods, Trans.)