#he's 15 years younger than Rudolf

[sarcasticdolphin]

Hmmmm. Fic idea?

Nevermind that I have like 10 WIPs going right now and should probably be focusing on writing.

So some time ago I had an idea kicking around of some sort of fic where Lucheni is Rudolf's whipping boy - an orphan that Sisi found on the streets of [Venice? City ultimately doesn't matter] and who she had taken into the royal household.

In time, Lucheni then ends up being made Rudolf's whipping boy - be this because Sisi goes traveling and no one else knows what to do with him or for some other reason is TBD at a later date.

And Rudolf is an absolute jerkface about it. He's more than a little jealous that his mother took in this peasant orphan street urchin and loved the boy while he, her own son, doesn't get so much as a kind word or glance.

So he acts out - after all, Lucheni is the one that gets beaten. I would even say he greatly enjoys being a sadistic little imperialist at times.

If Gondrecourt shows up that would lead to a very different dynamic than I usually write - Rudolf would be purposely making sure Lucheni gets punished.

As for Tod (cause lord knows I can't seem to write a fic without Tod):

Lucheni can see Tod, and can see him everywhere. In everything. He's almost mad, in a way. Because back then (especially for a poor child) Death is everywhere. Something like 40-50% of the population died before the age of 5. Lucheni knows Death in a way that none of the other characters in this story could ever hope to. In some ways he's been drawn away from Death, taken to the (comparative) safety of the Imperial Court - not that even the Imperial Court is immune from such things.

And I think Lucheni would see Death as almost a deity because of it, in a way. Which brings up the question, what does Death look like to Lucheni?

An angel? Perhaps when he was very young. But no, I think the correct answer for storytelling purposes in this fic would be Rudolf. That Death looks like Rudolf to Lucheni.

Because to Lucheni, Rudolf and Tod are two sides of the same coin. Mercurial masters. Rudolf vengeful and present but ultimately impotent, Tod oh-so potent in his power but more distant.

And so you end up with the relationships of:

Lucheni: Worshipful of Tod, Extremely mixed (like lust through to violence to jealousy to pity) feelings for Rudolf.

Rudolf: Hates Lucheni's guts. Tod relationship TBD.

Tod: Sees Rudolf as some sort of future trophy against Sisi or the like (may change this). Sees Lucheni as a passing curiosity if he even notices him at first.

Ok I'm waxing a little too poetical here. It's late.

We'll see if I have more (hopefully coherent) thoughts tomorrow.

[queenoffishingandcookies]

Currently considering the level of trauma that Rosa suffered in her early childhood, and a really weird headcanon(?) that my brain came up with. Specifically, her trauma pertaining to Beatrice and her siblings.

Then weird kind-of parallels between Beatrice’s incident and the destruction of her stuffed rabbit, Uu-tan, at the hands of Rudolf.

Spoilers for Banquet of the Golden Witch (Ep3 of Umineko) below.

Starting point was wondering if Uu-tan was ripped up before or after the incident. I think it was before, since she looks younger in the manga panels of Twilight, and mentions fearing the witch of the forest, but I’m not sure? In the manga, beat up as poor Uu-tan seems, I think Rosa did try to fix them, though.

I'll try my best to be somewhat coherent. Going back to 1967 for this.

Rosa…literally saw this girl she’d just met, a girl who was noticeably naive and had little concept of danger, just a little bit older than her, literally plummet over thirty feet to her death.

The lines in the VN make it clear, too, that Rosa ran down to ask if Beatrice was alright. That she stayed by Beatrice’s side for a while, shaking her corpse and trying to get her to react, all the while watching as blood and brain matter seeped from the elder girl’s broken skull and wouldn’t stop.

Beatrice died with her eyes open, too - so Rosa would have been staring down at the unfaltering literal death stare of a young woman she had literally just been speaking to, and trying to get her to move and react to see if she was okay.

The manga panels of Beatrice’s body after the fall were horrifying to look at, the first time I saw them. It makes sense, considering just how far she fell, but - imagine a child seeing that? Especially the way her fingers were bent?

I...am not going to put a photo of Beatrice's body here, solely for peace of my own mind.

Rosa was in middle school at the time. At the youngest, she could have been 12. The eldest she could have been was 15. Her birthday falls in June, but I don’t think we’re ever given any indication when in the year the incident happened.

My really morbid thought was that, maybe Rosa grew more dependent on her toys - especially Uu-tan - due to the trauma of witnessing Beatrice’s death (this is probably more likely if Uu-tan had been ripped up after the incident, but my line of thought is that Rosa still clung to them some time after trying to repair them).

It’s noted multiple times throughout the VN, especially in Turn, that there is a sizable age difference between Rosa and her elder siblings. They didn’t get along with Rosa, because she was so young and additionally, their own trauma and aspirations - if anything, they took their trauma and abuse out on her.

Krauss used to take her toys as punishment for things she didn’t remember doing, Eva would lie and trick her, and Rudolf would do both but make it ten times worse for Rosa, because Krauss and Eva were just as awful to him, and he could take it on on Rosa. And this is just the simplified rundown of the situation, doesn’t even touch on the full complexity of the layers of abuse and trauma that eventually are brought to bear their weight on Rosa’s shoulders.

On top of being unable to reach out to her elder siblings, Rosa lives and is brought up on an isolated island. She likely went to school off-island and made friends there, but it’s a known fact that Rokkenjima could be a difficult island to reach, despite its small size, even if a small amount of wind picked up.

Rosa has no close neighbors, no easy way of conversing with friends from school or visiting their houses. The closest she might have had for companions were the servants hired to work in the mansion.

This is what, similarly to her daughter Maria in the next generation, led Rosa to be reliant on the toys she owned for friends and company. Namely, her stuffed rabbit Uu-tan.

I’m not exactly sure about the scenario, but I think that Rosa only ever mentioned what happened to Genji - and that was to tell him about Beatrice’s fall. I think she was even told not to mention it to anyone else?

She couldn’t talk to her siblings about it, definitely couldn’t talk to her parents about it, so who else did she have to turn to, but her stuffed animals and dolls?

In the manga, Uu-tan literally had their head and arm ripped straight off by Rudolf. Their stomach was also torn open. It's some hardcore gore, even for a plushie. Which is my brain must have tied then to Beatrice.

In Twilight of the Golden Witch, when Rosa and Maria are hiding in Rosa's old room, Rosa actually finds Uu-tan on accident - and this is what I meant when I mentioned it looked like someone had tried to put them back together. Uu-tan's arm and head were reconnected to the body, and the stomach sewn up a little bit. Badly, as stuffing was still leaking out, some several decades later - but someone had tried to fix Uu-tan. They even had a little bandage around a leg,

My first morbid line of thought was that if Uu-tan had been ripped apart after Beatrice's death, it would have been made ten times worse by the fact that Rosa had already seen another person die from brutal head trauma, and something like seeing Uu-tan's head getting ripped off just made me think about Beatrice's fall.

If Uu-tan was ripped apart beforehand, and Rosa had tried to sew them back together, I imagined the comparison of Uu-tan's damaged body - despite the best repair efforts - and the leaking stuffing to the appearance of Beatrice's corpse post-fall.

The imagery is stuck in my brain, I swear. don't know if this makes much sense, but my brain won't drop it, so I decided to post about it. Literally has no bearing on the actual story, except for additional trauma for Rosa which...isn't good for anybody.

I'd call this self-indulgent rambling, but really this is just very morbid thoughts rambling which came to haunt me at one in the morning.

[darkveracity]

Complete Umineko Timeline

I recently finished my first readthrough of seminal 2007 murder mystery doujin visual novel Umineko: When they Cry. While I was reading I kept detailed notes on both my solutions to the murder mystery puzzles and the backstory timeline that led up to the game. I'm sure plenty of other people have gone over the solutions before but the timeline itself is likely to be interesting so I've cleaned it up for publication. This includes the following

Calculations for how we can derive dates that are never given explicitly but have enough evidence to constrain them to a narrow range (this applies to the years most of the adults were born)

Backstory events stretching out behind the catbox into the past

Post-1986 events stretching out in front of the catbox into the future (It should be noted that some of these differ slightly between the manga and the visual novel. I've chosen to follow the manga where applicable as it was written later and generally seems to contain Ryukishi's 'intended' solution)

For the contents of the catbox itself you'll want to take a look at the solutions (or maybe if there's a demand for it I'll write mine up too)

Discussion

Krauss, Eva, and Natsuhi

Umineko never directly states how old Krauss, Eva, and Natsuhi are. However we have the following pieces of evidence we can use to pinpoint things

Eva mentions that Natsuhi is three years younger than her during one of the parlor scenes in Legend

Eva’s narration refers to Krauss as her older brother of two years during her flashback at the beginning of Banquet

Natsuhi was childless for 12 years before having Jessica 18 years ago, placing her marriage 30 years ago in 1956

The Ushiromiyas moved to Rokkenjima in 1952. Eva’s flashback at the beginning of Banquet takes place while she’s living on Rokkenjima and at the tail end of high school demanding to go to college (ages 15-17)

Eva’s birthday is October 21

This places limits on their possible ages in both directions. The school year in Japan begins in April and students begin elementary school at age 6. Therefore, to have been attending high school in 1952, Eva must have been born somewhere in the range 1936-1938. Since Natsuhi is three years younger than her and got married in 1956 this means she was married somewhere between age 15 and age 17. There’s nothing I would put past Kinzo but the older end of that range seems most likely so for this timeline I chose to make Krauss born in 1934, Eva born in 1936, and Natsuhi born in 1939

Rudolf, Asumu, and Kyrie

Like his siblings we’re never given Rudolf’s exact age but we can get a good estimate from the available evidence

The Ushiromiyas moved to Rokkenjima in 1952. When the siblings discuss the stories of wolves on the island in Banquet, we’re told that Rudolf was in elementary school (ages 6-11) at the time

Kinzo’s flashback in the manga version of Requiem establishes visually that Krauss, Eva, and Rudolf were all born before he enlisted in 1944

Rudolf’s birthday is September 29

Just like for Eva, this constrains the possible years Rudolf could have been born to between 1941 and 1943. Of these 1941 is the most likely because the age difference between him and Eva doesn’t seem particularly large

All we can say about Asumu and Kyrie’s ages is that they went to college with Rudolf and are therefore close in age to him. As a side note Asumu’s family name Akinaka is never given anywhere in Umineko but Ryukishi specified it on twitter in 2013 so I’ve chosen to use it here

Rosa

In a recurring pattern Rosa’s age is never stated exactly but it’s easy to infer

Rosa met the girl who was imprisoned in Kuwadorian in 1967 and was in middle school (ages 12-14) at the time

Rosa had Maria in 1977

Rosa’s birthday is June 3

The possible years she could have been born are then 1953-1955 which means she had Maria somewhere between age 22 and age 24. I’m again most inclined to pick the early date since it makes her have Maria at a slightly more reasonable age.

Unfortunately, this age doesn’t completely make sense with the stories we’re told about her childhood. Her siblings would all have been essentially full adults by the time she was old enough to spend much time interacting with them so the stories we hear about them tormenting her are reframed as adults hurting a six year old. Not exactly impossible in Umineko but it casts everything in a very different light

The Kuwadorian Girl

Requiem refers to Kinzo raping the Kuwadorian girl when she was the same age Bice was when he first met her. For the sake of intergenerational parallels across the three Beatrices, this age is almost certainly 19, placing both her birth and Bice’s death in 1948, but all we know for certain is that she was older than Rosa but not a full adult when she met her. Since Bice died before the mansion's completion in 1952 and the Kuwadorian girl died in 1967 the lower bound on her age is 15.

Alternatively, we can consider the circumstances of Rosa's birth and work backwards. Krauss, Eva, and Rudolf were all conceived before Kinzo left for the war and when he returned he neglected his wife to spend time with his mistress instead. Rosa, who was born significantly later, appears to have been conceived after Bice was already dead. From this we can infer a possible sequence of events - perhaps Kinzo in his grief at losing the woman he loved tried sleeping with his legal wife one last time to see if maybe he could find solace in her arms and that produced Rosa. Following this methodology the Kuwadorian girl's most likely age is exactly nine months older than Rosa or roughly 15 at the time of her death. I've chosen to follow the parallels and make her 19 on the timeline but you can make a good argument for either.

Erika

Erika is described as a few years younger than Jessica. Her backstory sounds like it takes place in college but we should probably chalk this up to the anime tendency to pretend high schoolers are independent adults and treat it as taking place in high school. With nothing else to go on, the best we can do is fall back on Higurashi parallels - Erika is a double for Bernkastel who most closely resembles a 16 year old Rika

George

At the beginning of Legend Battler says that George is "five years older than me so he's probably turning 23 this year". George's birthday is March 19 which is before October so at first glance this might seem like a logic error but the answer is just that Battler doesn't remember his cousins' birthdays and George is already 23

Jessica

There's no question whatsoever about the date of Jessica's birth. She was born on August 25, 1968 to an extremely happy Natsuhi. What's a little more in doubt is the circumstances. If we count backwards nine months to get the timeframe for her conception, we find that Jessica was conceived in late November 1967. Lion's 'birthday' ie the day that they were given to Natsuhi is November 29, 1967 which lines up almost exactly with Jessica's conception. Following the same logic that connects Rosa's conception to Bice's death a certain possibility arises here too - perhaps Kinzo handled the death of the Kuwadorian girl by once again sleeping with the nearest available woman to see if perhaps she could be a replacement and this resulted in Jessica. It would certainly explain why Natsuhi was unable to get pregnant for twelve years and then suddenly conceived if it were in fact Krauss who was infertile the whole time.

That being said we have it in red that Natsuhi is pure and faithful so perhaps this whole line of logic is faulty from the start. Umineko certainly never implies anything of the sort on purpose

Lion & Sayo

The date of Lion and Sayo's birth is unclear. Lion was given to Natsuhi on November 29, 1967 and Sayo was given the birthday of May 25 at the orphanage but it's not clear that either of these is their true birthday. The most we can say is that they were born at some point in 1967

Ange

This one’s an actual logic error. We are given the following three pieces of evidence which cannot simultaneously be true

Ange’s birthday is June 17 and she’s six years old therefore she was born in 1980

Battler made a promise to Sayo six years ago at the 1980 family conference in early October

Asumu died, Rudolf married a pregnant Kyrie, and Battler left the Ushiromiya family after that promise

As June comes before October this situation is impossible. We could try to resolve it by saying that Ange was born six months before Asumu died but the narrative is clear that Kyrie was pregnant when she got married, not already raising an illegitimate child. Similarly we could claim that Battler actually made his promise at a non-family conference visit to Rokkenjima in early 1980 but Requiem clearly shows us the first, second, and third family conferences after Battler leaves and has Kanon be created at the third one three years ago so this throws off the entire timeline. The only remotely reasonable solution is to decide that Ange was actually born on June 17, 1981 and is just the kind of little kid who likes to say she’s six when she’s really five and a half (and then keeps doing this for the rest of her life so she calls herself eighteen when she’s really seventeen and a half)

Timeline

1900s:

Nanjo Terumasa is born (April 5)

Ronoue Genji is born (June 10)

Kumasawa Chiyo is born (July 19)

Ushiromiya Kinzo is born (August 17)

1910s:

Genji and Kinzo grow up in Taiwan together. They are both the sons of rich families and they become close friends

1923:

The great Kanto earthquake destroys the Ushiromiya family. The surviving family elders pick Kinzo (20s), a distantly related branch family member to be the new family head ostensibly because he has polydactyly but really because they want to use him as a puppet

1926:

Beatrice Castiglioni is born (September 14)

1920s:

Hideyoshi is born (November 25)

Kinzo (20s) is forced to marry a woman he does not love and spends twenty years as a living corpse, enduring life without really living. His only solace is his love for reading foreign books

1934:

Ushiromiya Krauss is born (February 26)

1936:

Ushiromiya Eva is born (October 21)

1939:

Natsuhi is born (July 30)

1940:

Krauss (6) begins elementary school

1941:

Ushiromiya Rudolf is born (September 29)

1940s:

Sumadera Kyrie is born (November 8)

Sumadera Kasumi is born (September 10)

Akinaka Asumu is born

1943:

Eva (6 going on 7) begins elementary school

1944:

Kinzo (40s) volunteers to fight in WWII. He is assigned to a secret submarine base on Rokkenjima as engineering staff. No Japanese submarines ever actually dock at the base and eventually the navy decides to store an enormous quantity of explosives on the island so it can be strategically blown up if necessary

1945:

An Italian submarine carrying ten tons of secret gold docks at the Rokkenjima base and Kinzo (40s) meets Beatrice (19) who is serving as the Italian translator. Kinzo incites a shootout over the gold which kills everyone else on the island and the two run away together as lovers. He meets Nanjo (40s) as the doctor on Nijima who treats Beatrice’s wounds

Kinzo performs the most difficult con of his life and manages to prevent the military from finding out what happened on Rokkenjima or discovering the presence of the gold

1946:

Natsuhi (6 going on 7) begins elementary school

Krauss (12) begins middle school

1940s:

Kinzo begins living a double life, spending as much of his time as possible with his mistress Beatrice while maintaining appearances with his family

Kinzo foresees that Genji’s family will meet a horrible fate if they stay in Taiwan during the post-war chaos. Unfortunately he is only able to convince Genji to leave and the rest of them perish. In gratitude for saving him, Genji decides to dedicate the rest of his life to serving Kinzo as his butler

Kinzo uses a variety of legal shenanigans to acquire ownership of Rokkenjima and secure the location of the gold

Kinzo takes inspiration from the poorly pressed bird symbol in which only one wing is visible on the gold and creates the one winged eagle family crest. He represses any ingots taken outside Rokkenjima with the symbol he designed

Kinzo takes a trusted business contact, the president of the Marusoo company, to see the gold. He gives him physical possession of one ton of the gold as collateral and has him take back a single ingot to be appraised. With this level of verification he is able to take out massive loans from the business community. He uses his foreign language skills to get in extremely close with the post-war occupying forces and makes vast amounts of money providing supplies for the Korean War. Finally he repays his debts and retrieves the collateral from his friend, leaving him with a single ingot as a commemorative gift

Hideyoshi is left orphaned by the war. He decides to build a company from the ground up, starting with stealing supplies from the occupying forces. Slowly but surely he becomes a powerful businessman

1948:

Rudolf (6 going on 7) begins elementary school

Beatrice (23) dies in childbirth. Kinzo (40s) is heartbroken and decides to treat her daughter as her reincarnation, giving her the name Ushiromiya Beatrice

1949:

Krauss (15) begins high school

Eva (12 going on 13) begins middle school

1952:

Kinzo (50s) constructs a secret mansion on Rokkenjima known as Kuwadorian and uses it to house his new daughter. At the same time he builds a secret underground VIP room to store the gold. He comes up with an elaborate riddle to hide its secret and builds a complicated mechanism to open the door. Finally, he repurposes the explosives on the island to build a special clock that will blow up the entire island at midnight if a switch is set. He uses this doomsday device to gamble his life by setting time limits for problem solving and is able to achieve short bursts of brilliant madness that drive enormous business success

Kinzo (50s) finishes construction of his new home on the other side of Rokkenjima from Kuwadorian. He moves his entire family to live there and frequently disappears for long periods of time to visit Beatrice. The two mansions are linked by a secret underground passageway left over from the island’s days as a military base

Krauss (18) begins college

Eva (15 going on 16) begins high school

Natsuhi (12 going on 13) begins middle school

1953:

Ushiromiya Rosa is born (June 3)

1950s:

Kinzo uses some of his wealth to create Fukuin House, an orphanage for children with nowhere else to go. He begins taking ambitious teenagers from the orphanage as young servants in order to give them practical experience and money to start their lives with

Kinzo violently abuses his children and constantly screams and insults them

Kinzo’s wife becomes extremely suspicious that he’s cheating on her with a blonde but is never able to find evidence. Every time he disappears to visit the girl in Kuwadorian she organizes all of the servants to frantically search the house and attempt to find him. Eventually it becomes commonly accepted knowledge that Kinzo has a secret mistress and her hopeless situation drives her to despair

Krauss frequently beats and insults his younger siblings to compensate for his complex about not being able to live up to his father’s expectations

Eva becomes obsessed with earning her father’s respect and works as hard as possible to become a good student and achieve great things, even becoming class president when Krauss never became more than vice-president. She loathes Krauss for automatically being the successor simply because he’s a man. In order to fuel her work ethic she creates an alternate self representing her childhood dreams that lives inside her as a witch

Rudolf constantly sneaks off into the shadows for sexual liaisons with the maids

Rosa grows up extremely lonely with no friends anywhere near her age and no one who is willing to pay attention to her. She retreats into a world of playing with dolls and stuffed animals until eventually her older siblings rip up her most treasured friend U-tan the rabbit and declare that she’s dead

Natsuhi grows up in an extraordinarily strict environment, kept isolated from the world as a princess

Kinzo collects a number of Winchester rifles and practices shooting them in the woods

1954:

Rudolf (12 going on 13) begins middle school

1955:

Eva (18 going on 19) graduates high school and manages to go to college against her father’s wishes through sheer hard work

Natsuhi (15 going on 16) begins high school

1956:

Krauss (22) graduates from college and begins working as a real estate investor

Kinzo (50s) crushes Natsuhi’s (17) family and as a prize forces her to marry Krauss (22). It is not clear whether she is given the chance to complete high school. She is unable to bear a child for a very long time despite trying

1957:

Rudolf (15 going on 16) begins high school

1959:

Eva (22 going on 23) graduates from college

1960:

Rudolf (18 going on 19) graduates high school and goes to college. While there he begins perpetrating elaborate fraud schemes and seducing women. He acquires a large harem of hangers-on but eventually ends up splitting most of his time between Kyrie who is his business partner and Asumu who provides him with emotional support

Rosa (6 going on 7) begins elementary school

1962:

Eva (26) marries Hideyoshi (40s). Due to Natsuhi’s (23) failure to bear a child she is able to have him transferred into the Ushiromiya family register

1963:

George is born to Eva (26 going on 27) and Hideyoshi (40s) (March 19)

1964:

Rudolf (22 going on 23) graduates from college and partners with Kyrie (20s) to found a new company

1966:

Rosa (12 going on 13) begins middle school

1967:

Kinzo (60s) forces the Kuwadorian girl (19) to have his incestuous child

In late November, Rosa (14) runs away from home after having a fight with her mother and encounters the Kuwadorian girl (19). She helps her escape but while attempting to get back to the mansion she falls off a cliff and dies. After this incident Kuwadorian is shut down for good

Kinzo (60s) gives the child he had with the Kuwadorian girl to Natsuhi (28) to raise. She treats this as an insult due to her inability to have a child and is so disgusted that she pushes the servant carrying the baby off a cliff. The servant dies but Genji covers up the incident and police rule it an accident. Kinzo is driven deeply into madness and begins to isolate himself and spend all of his time studying the occult

Kinzo’s child survives the fall but Genji (60s) sends them to Fukuin House and conceals them from Natsuhi and Kinzo. They are given the name Yasuda Sayo and the birthday May 25. Although the child was assigned male at birth, the fall severely damages their genitals and afterwards it is decided to raise them as a girl. Nanjo performs the surgery that saves their life and at the same time he amputates their polydactyly sixth toe. He ‘carelessly’ leaves a scar, ensuring that Kinzo will one day be able to recognize them

In an alternate timeline where Natsuhi (28) does not attempt to kill the child, they are given the name Ushiromiya Lion and raised as the successor to the Ushiromiya headship with the new birthday November 29

1968:

Kyrie (20s) and Asumu (20s) get pregnant at the same time. Asumu discovers the pregnancy first and convinces Rudolf to have a shotgun marriage. Their delivery dates are on the same day. Asumu miscarries, Kyrie has Ushiromiya Battler, and then while they’re both barely conscious Rudolf (26 going on 27) swaps the babies so that his legal wife will be the one who gives birth (July 15). Asumu almost certainly figures out what has happened but resolves to love Battler as her own son regardless

Kyrie (20s) manages to use Rudolf’s (27) influence to completely escape from the Sumadera family. Kasumi is forced to take on her responsibilities as the successor and marry a man she does not love

At long last Natsuhi (29) is able to bear a child and Jessica is born (August 25)

1969:

Rosa (15 going on 16) begins high school

George (6) begins elementary school

1970:

Furudo Erika is born (October 4)

1972:

Rosa (18 going on 19) graduates high school and begins college. Presumably the battle Eva fought with Kinzo to secure her own education allows Rosa to do the same as Rosa certainly doesn’t have the guts to fight for it herself

1970s:

Genji decides to fake Sayo’s age and claim that she is three years younger than she really is to avoid Natsuhi and Kinzo realizing her identity. In order to make this work he ensures that she grows up completely isolated within the orphanage. She spends all of her time locked inside and is never allowed to make friends who might notice that she’s not the age she’s supposed to be

Rudolf and Kyrie build a powerful company together, constantly skirting the law and committing serious fraud. Many of their rivals are driven so far into debt that they commit suicide

Kinzo's legal wife dies. He cries at her funeral but not very much

1974:

In the alternate timeline where Natsuhi raised Sayo as Lion (6 going on 7) they begin elementary school

1975:

Jessica (6 going on 7) begins elementary school

Battler (6 going on 7) begins elementary school

George (12) begins middle school

1976:

Rosa (22 going on 23) graduates college and begins creating a fashion company

Genji (70s) arranges for Sayo (9 pretending to be 6) to begin working at the mansion under the name Shannon. In order to hide her existence from Natsuhi (36) and Kinzo (70s) he claims she is three years younger than she actually is. She treats the Shannon identity as a sort of imaginary friend representing the ideal servant girl she would like to become

Lunon, Sanon, Lenon, and Leion begin working at the same time as Sayo (9 pretending to be 6). They are significantly older than her and do not treat her very well

1970s:

Sayo slowly acclimates to life as a servant. After repeatedly losing things she invents a witch who she calls Beatrice but will later call Gaap as an imaginary friend who takes her possessions. Kumasawa teaches her a series of tricks to not lose things which she frames as rituals to keep the witch at bay

Sayo breaks a vase which is particularly dear to Kinzo. Kumasawa helps her avoid punishment by claiming the vase was broken by a stray cat, teaching her the concept of magic that matches a result

Due to being thrown off a cliff when she was a baby, Sayo does not have normal hormone production and does not go through puberty, remaining waifish and androgynous. She is extremely disturbed by her boyish appearance and lack of periods and begins to hate mirrors. In order to look more feminine she begins padding her chest

Sayo learns that she shares a deep love of mystery novels with Battler and begins to fall in love with him over repeated visits. He tells her about his ideal girl with a description broadly taken from porn magazines. Asumu watches over and supports their relationship

1977:

Ushiromiya Maria is born (March 29). Her father tricks Rosa (23 going on 24) into taking out a giant loan for him and then flees the country, leaving her a single mother

Erika (6 going on 7) begins elementary school

Sayo (9 going on 10 pretending to be 6 going on 7) begins elementary school

1978:

George (15) begins high school

1979:

Lunon, Sanon, Lenon, and Leion graduate from being Ushiromiya servants. Asne, Belne, and Manon begin working as replacements

Sayo (12 pretending to be 9) trains the new servants. Belne doesn’t take the stories of the witch seriously so in order to teach her a lesson, Sayo begins conducting a series of pranks on her. She hides her master key in Belne’s locker, waits for Belne to unlock a room and put her keys down, swaps her keyring without the master key with Belne’s, and then asks Belne to lock the door. This makes it appear as though the key was moved from Belne’s ring to the locker by magic while giving Sayo a strong alibi for stealing it. After many similar experiences, Belne repents and believes in the witch

Sayo (12 pretending to be 9) abandons the desire to become an ideal servant which Shannon represented and instead begins planning to become a witch. She revises her imaginary scenario so that now she is the witch Beatrice and Gaap is a demon who is her close friend. Her witchsona with long greenish-blonde hair and a white dress will later be known as Clair Vaux Bernardus

1980:

Battler (12) visits Rokkenjima for the last time before leaving the family. He promises Sayo (13 pretending to be 10) that when she’s ready to leave the island he’ll come for her on a white horse and whisk her away. He gives her until the family conference next year to decide whether to take him up on his offer

George (17) watches Battler (12) and Sayo (13 pretending to be 10) talking and gets extremely jealous

In the alternate timeline where Natsuhi raised Sayo as Lion (12 going on 13) they begin middle school

1981:

Jessica (12 going on 13) begins middle school

George (18) graduates from high school and begins college

Battler (12 going on 13) begins middle school

In the alternate timeline where Natsuhi raised Sayo as Lion (13 going on 14) they are elected vice president of their middle school class

Kyrie (30s) gets pregnant with Ange and finally gains the certain determination to kill Asumu (30s). However before she can act Asumu dies for unrelated reasons. Rudolf (39 going on 40) marries Kyrie immediately, and Ange is born shortly afterwards (June 17). Battler (12 going on 13) is so offended by this series of events that he leaves the Ushiromiya family and goes to live with Asumu’s parents for the next six years, taking the family name Akinaka. When Sayo (14 pretending to be 11) learns that he has left the family she convinces herself that this is a trial of love and if only she waits for him while believing hard enough he will come for her next year

Battler (13) does not attend the family conference. Sayo (14 pretending to be 11) is heartbroken but tells herself that he’ll come next year

1980s:

A number of important pieces of media come out earlier in the Umineko timeline than in our world. Touhou becomes popular, and Pretty Cure style magical girl shows begin airing on TV including one that stars Bernkastel

In the alternate timeline where Natsuhi raised Sayo as Lion they begin playing badminton and achieve great success at tournaments

Maria meets a priest who tells her about Jesus. This experience convinces her that she too is a child of god with magical powers and she undertakes intense occult self-study

Rosa regularly leaves Maria alone for days at a time so that she can go on trips with men. The entire neighborhood becomes extremely worried about her. Maria begins to become isolated both at school and at home and is regularly bullied

Sayo begins meeting with Maria as her witchsona every time she visits the island. She convinces her that she is a witch by showing her small magic tricks and becomes her best friend

Battler wins a set of cheap plastic hair ornaments for Ange at a fair. They become one of her most treasured possessions

Erika goes out with a boy who is living some sort of double life. She collects circumstantial evidence and becomes convinced he’s cheating on her. It’s unprovable but the core themes of this narrative suggest that the secret is probably actually crossdressing

Rosa gives Maria a cheap department store plushie and pretends she made it herself. Maria names him Sakutaro and loves him with all her heart

Sayo begins actively building the legend of the golden witch by telling ghost stories and playing occult themed pranks on people. Through her hard work she combines the existing ghost stories about the evil spirits of Rokkenjima with the story of Kinzo’s mistress to create an environment where all unexplainable phenomena will be blamed on a witch

A servant falls down the stairs and quits after being seriously injured. This is quickly incorporated into the legend of the golden witch as Beatrice punishing those who don't believe in her

Sayo begins to invent more OCs, creating Ronove as a double for Genji, Virgilia as a double for Kumasawa, and the seven sisters of purgatory as anthropomorphizations of Kinzo's occult paperweights. Maria gives them all names. In exchange Sayo creates the Chiesters and Sakutaro for her as anthropomorphized versions of her rabbit figures and her favorite stuffed animal

Sayo becomes close friends with Jessica

Jessica begins practicing playing guitar secretly at school and wishes she could get away from her family and play in a band

After Rosa leaves Maria alone for so long that she's picked up by the police, a child protective services officer visits the family. Rosa assaults the officer, and in her rage at Maria rips Sakutaro apart and smashes one of Maria’s rabbits. The CPS officer opens a case to attempt to have Maria placed in state custody but Rosa uses her wealth and influence to get it dismissed

The president of the Marusoo company dies and Krauss manages to obtain the ingot he was given, acquiring physical proof that the Ushiromiya gold exists

Krauss makes a series of bad business investments and is repeatedly defrauded. He attempts to turn Rokkenjima into a resort but the project falls apart leaving him with a newly built guesthouse and no visitors. In his desperation he begins to embezzle Kinzo’s money and makes shady backroom deals offering up ownership of the island itself as collateral

1982:

In the alternate timeline where Natsuhi raised Sayo as Lion (14 going on 15) they are elected president of their middle school class

Asne, Belne, and Manon graduate from being Ushiromiya servants

Battler (14) does not attend the family conference. Sayo (15 pretending to be 12) begins to doubt whether he ever made her a promise at all or whether she merely misinterpreted him

1983:

Maria (6) begins elementary school

Erika (12 going on 13) begins middle school

Sayo (15 going on 16 pretending to be 12 going on 13) begins middle school

In the alternate timeline where Natsuhi raised Sayo as Lion (15 going on 16) they begin high school

Battler (14) does not attend the family conference. He sends letters to his cousins. He either does not write a letter to Sayo (16 pretending to be 13) or the letter he writes is stolen by George. She buries her grief by externalizing her feelings and pushing them onto her witch persona Beato. At the same time she begins experimenting with dressing as a boy and creates the Kanon persona with cooperation from Genji and Kumasawa. By pushing her love for Battler onto Beato and all of her negative emotions onto Kanon she is able to keep Shannon as a purely positive persona

George (20) has a marriage interview with a girl Eva (47) wants him to marry named Ayumi. Eva taunts Sayo (16 pretending to be 13) with the fact that the two of them can never be together

Sayo (16 pretending to be 13) accidentally spills soup on herself while serving Kinzo (80s) and removes her kneesock in front of him. He sees the scar from the amputation of her polydactyly and realizes that she is his child who survived the fall after all. Afterwards he begins to try to get closer to her and teaches her to shoot his guns

1984:

Jessica (15 going on 16) begins high school

Battler (15 going on 16) begins high school

In the alternate timeline where Natsuhi raised Sayo as Lion (16 going on 17) they are elected vice president of their high school class

Kinzo hangs a portrait of Beatrice with the witch’s epitaph in the main hall of the mansion in April. Sayo (16 going on 7 pretending to be 13 going on 14) revises her witchsona so that it is now a blond haired beauty matching both the woman in the portrait and Battler’s image of an ideal girl

George (21) and Sayo (17 pretending to be 14) begin to get closer and go on a few outings together. They are not quite dating yet but the possibility of romance is there

Jessica (16) becomes disturbed by the way Maria (7) talks about Beatrice and starts to investigate. Sayo (17 pretending to be 14) tells her a ghost story about the golden witch appearing in the VIP room at 2 in the morning. She then places a creepy doll on the bedside table in the room, gives instructions to Genji and Kumasawa to act as accomplices, and hides under the bed in the dark waiting. At 2 am when Jessica enters the VIP room an accomplice places a phone call to the room and plays a recording of Maria singing. Afterwards another accomplice in the basement shuts off the lights on the circuit breaker. Under the cover of darkness Sayo climbs out from under the bed, grabs the doll, cackles loudly, and leaves the room. After this experience Jessica decides to stop investigating

Genji gives Sayo (17 pretending to be 14) a hint regarding the epitaph by telling her that Kinzo’s beloved hometown is in Taiwan. Over the course of many months she works her way through the entire riddle and eventually on November 29 she finds the hidden gold. Genji dresses her in the witch dress, takes her to Kinzo, and finally tells him the truth about their relationship. Kinzo apologizes for everything, gives her the head’s ring and keels over dead. Afterwards Sayo orders Genji, Kumasawa, and Nanjo to keep these events secret and decides to continue working as a servant while waiting for Battler’s return

Sayo (17 pretending to be 14) is utterly horrified at learning the truth about herself. Her incestuous heritage, her body that cannot bear children, the bloodstained wealth of the Ushiromiyas seized with betrayal and murder, and her unwitting romantic relationships with her blood relatives all drive her to despair

Natsuhi (45) discovers that Kinzo is dead. Krauss (50) confesses to embezzling his father’s wealth and tells her that he may face criminal charges for it. She decides to maintain the illusion that he is alive until Krauss can fix their financial situation. She hides his body in the freezer in his study and orders Genji to begin lighting strong incense in the room to hide the smell

1985:

George (22) graduates from college. He begins working at his father’s company to gain business experience

In the alternate timeline where Natsuhi raised Sayo as Lion (17 going on 18) they are elected president of their high school class

Gohda is dismissed from his job working at a high end hotel due to a dispute between the staff and the management and his involvement in an affair. He has difficulty finding work in the restaurant industry and decides to apply to work for the Ushiromiyas. Natsuhi (46) hires him

Gohda tells Sayo (18 pretending to be 15) that witches do not exist. In order to force him to believe she sets up a situation where he and Genji are the only two people on the island. After Gohda finishes cleaning the kitchen and leaves, Genji creates an occult sculpture using paint and kitchen supplies then summons Gohda, pretends to have discovered it, and asks for help cleaning it up. Afterwards Gohda does not disrespect the witch out loud again

Jessica (17) asks Sayo (18 pretending to be 15) whether Kanon is single. Sayo is simultaneously overjoyed to be loved and disgusted at the incestuous nature of that love. Despite herself she begins to fall in love with Jessica as Kanon

Maria (8) attempts to teach Ange (4) about magic but Ange rejects her, driving her further into isolation

Natsuhi (46) manages to get through the family conference without anyone noticing that Kinzo is dead with the help of Genji (80s), Nanjo (80s), Kumasawa (80s), Sayo (18 pretending to be 15), and Krauss (51)

1986:

Sayo (18 going on 19 pretending to be 15 going on 16) completes middle school. In her complete despair she does not bother advancing to high school and chooses to drop out

Erika (15 going on 16) begins high school

Jessica (17 going on 18) runs for class president at her mother’s insistence and wins the election. She does not enjoy the position

In the alternate timeline where Natsuhi raised Sayo as Lion (18 going on 19) they graduate high school and begin college

Jessica (18) gives Sayo (19 pretending to be 16) a mixtape containing songs that she likes to try to get closer to her as Kanon

George (23) takes Sayo (19 pretending to be 16) on a trip to Okinawa. She hopes that the trip will give her an opportunity to confess the truth to him but he doesn’t so much as touch her and the right moment to confess never arrives. He tells her that he plans to propose to her at the next family conference, completely driving her into a corner and leaving her with an unavoidable deadline coming up

Sayo (19 pretending to be 16) sets herself up on a culture festival date with Jessica (18). Afterwards Jessica confesses to her and Sayo rejects her. This is extraordinarily painful for her because she is in love with Jessica but she is convinced that the romance is doomed and too scared to try

Krauss (52) manages to put together an actually profitable real estate deal for once. He becomes convinced that if he can just hold on a little longer he will be able to repay all his debts and hide his criminal embezzlement

Hideyoshi (60s) attempts to list his company publicly. He fails to secure a majority stake and is attacked in a hostile takeover attempt, pushing him into a position where he needs to acquire an enormous amount of money to defend against it

Rudolf (45) attempts to expand his business overseas. He accidentally violates another major company’s intellectual property rights and enters a position where he needs to acquire an enormous amount of money to settle with them

Rosa’s (33) debt comes due, placing her in a position where she needs to acquire an enormous amount of money to pay it off

Battler (18) returns to the Ushiromiya family after Asumu’s parents die

Sayo (19 pretending to be 16) learns that Battler (18) will return and is driven completely mad by her hopeless situation and the combined weight of the family’s sins. She writes out countless murder suicide plans, creating fragment world after fragment world and transcends humanity, becoming a witch. Metafictionally, she becomes a miko of Lambdadelta who guarantees her power as long as her plan continues to have absolute certainty

Sayo (19 pretending to be 16) begins making extensive preparations for her murder game. She tests explosives from the stockpile under the island by blowing up the Rokkenjima shrine and practices firing guns extensively. She converts a billion yen worth of the gold to cash and sets up a series of postcards which will be sent to the families of the victims leading them to some of the money. Shortly before the family conference she places her murder fic in wine bottles and hurls it into the sea

Sayo (19 pretending to be 16) recruits accomplices for her plan. Kumasawa and Nanjo happily agree to help her after being told it will be a murder mystery prank. She tells Genji her full plans and he does not raise any objections to the idea of destroying the entire Ushiromiya family in a complex murder suicide scheme. Finally, she has Maria memorize her letter in advance in order to serve as a good messenger and tells her a magical account of her plans in which everyone will be resurrected in the golden land. Any other accomplices are specific to a particular fragment and are mostly recruited the day of

The following people gather for the Ushiromiya family conference:

Ange (5 and a half but likes to say she’s 6) stays at home

Kinzo (80s) who has been dead for over a year but is kept alive as a ghost by Natsuhi’s efforts

Krauss (52), Natsuhi (47), and Jessica (18)

Eva (49 going on 50), Hideyoshi (60s), and George (23)

Rudolf (45), Kyrie (40s), and Battler (18)

Rosa (33), and Maria (9)

Nanjo (80s), Genji (80s), Kumasawa (80s), and Gohda (?)

Sayo (19 pretending to be 16). In the alternate timeline where Natsuhi raised her she instead attends the conference as Lion (19)

Erika (16) falls off a boat near Rokkenjima. With the help of a miracle she could have drifted to the island

The family conference occurs and its events are locked away in a catbox forever when the mansion is destroyed in an explosion

Within the catbox the adults solve the epitaph and reach the room of the gold before Sayo can carry out her murder plans. A gunfight breaks out and Kyrie and Rudolf decide to slaughter everyone on the island, blow it all up, and run away with the bank card with a billion yen. Eva manages to stop them but is unable to save anyone but herself and decides to blow the island up anyway to hide the truth. She escapes to Kuwadorian and survives the explosion

In the alternate timeline where Natsuhi raised Sayo as Lion, Kinzo is still alive and he holds a funeral for the two Beatrices in the morning. In the evening during the family conference his children argue with him over Lion becoming the head until he decides to give them the witch’s epitaph and tell them that if they can solve it they can have the headship. His children find the gold and the same events play out with the addition that Kyrie also kills Kinzo and Lion

Sayo survives the gunfight, changes her mind about committing murder suicide, rescues Battler, and confesses almost everything to him. The two of them escape through the secret tunnel to the submarine base and attempt to take a motorboat away from the island. Sayo jumps into the water to drown herself using a gold ingot as a weight and Battler leaps in after her. She dies, and he almost drowns

After pulling himself out of the water in a haze Battler is hit by a car and temporarily loses his memories. He’s saved by Hachijou Ikuko who gives him the new name Hachijou Tohya and functionally kidnaps him. Metafictionally Ushiromiya Battler and Yasuda Sayo drown together and become trapped in purgatory. Sayo decides to begin tormenting him with her witch games until he eventually remembers the truth

In a popular alternate interpretation Sayo survives the suicide attempt, adopts the identity of Hachijou Ikuko, and resolves to live with Battler for the rest of her life without ever revealing the truth to him

1987:

Ange (5 going on 6) begins elementary school

Eva (50s) becomes the Ushiromiya family head and is tormented by police investigations and media attacks. Everyone believes her to be the true culprit. However the police are never able to find any evidence and the massacre is formally ruled an accident

After the massacre, the families of the victims receive the mysterious postcards Sayo mailed out. None of them claim the money

Eva sells the portion of Kinzo's occult library stored in Kuwadorian. This draws a significant amount of attention from the occult community as it contains many rare treasures

Two of the message bottles containing Legend and Turn wash up and are found by the police. Combined with the occult attention from Kinzo's library, this causes the crime to be regarded as the work of a witch in the public eye. A large majority of the message bottles are lost at sea and never found

Eva takes guardianship of Ange. She desperately wants to love her and become her mother but the two of them are both deeply broken from grief and Ange is unable to trust Eva which slowly poisons their relationship. At Tanabata Ange wishes to get her family back and convinces herself that the wish will only be fulfilled if she treats Eva as their murderer and never lets her into her heart

After a series of episodes where Eva screams and hits her for so long that she forgets why she was originally angry, Eva realizes that she’s going to destroy Ange’s life and decides to send her away rather than hurt her anymore. When Ange attempts to run away and go back to her grandfather’s house, Eva uses it as an excuse to send her to a boarding school

1980s:

Eva writes a secret diary describing the true events of the catbox

The true crime community around Rokkenjima becomes a large community of dedicated witch hunters. People begin forging message bottles to write fan fiction

Tohya slowly adjusts to his new life living with Ikuko and the two of them begin publishing mystery novels together. To celebrate completing their first book, Ikuko shares a third message bottle which she found on the beach containing Sayo’s full confession with him. He remembers his past as Battler but is unable to accept it as his own memories and resolves to continue his life as Tohya. In the alternate interpretation where Ikuko is Sayo she simply writes out her confession and claims to have found it in a message bottle

Tohya and Ikuko begin writing forgeries, continuing the metafictional narrative that began in Sayo’s two surviving games. Tohya falsely believes Eva to be the true culprit and begins his forgeries by writing Banquet, a narrative in which she murders everyone and survives. After reading his work, Eva realizes who he is, pays him a visit, and tells him the truth. She leaves the key to her diary with him in the hope that he might one day share it with Ange if she makes her way to him too

Tohya writes Alliance, End, and Dawn completing his metarrative and laying Sayo to rest. It’s not clear whether Requiem and Twilight are ever written in the real world at all and if so they’re certainly never published. He incorporates Ikuko's cat Bernkastel as the primary antagonist of the latter part of the story (as a sidenote, the existence of the Magical Bern-chan anime in-universe implies that Ikuko named her cat after her favorite magical girl)

1993:

Ange (11 going on 12) begins middle school

1990s:

Eva (50s) amasses an enormous fortune, surviving the collapse of the Japanese economy in the early 90s and becoming even richer than Kinzo once was. This is made even more impressive by the fact that she started with a small fraction of the capital he did

The witch hunter community unearths Rudolf and Kyrie’s criminal past and begins to accuse them of being the true culprits

Ange is utterly miserable and alone at boarding school where she is constantly bullied. She has Maria’s diary and begins to use it to retreat into delusions, summoning Maria’s ghost, Sakutaro, and the stakes as imaginary friends. Eventually she is attacked in a bullying incident so bad that it makes her want to kill everyone present and she is forced to abandon this coping mechanism when she realizes it provides her no power to affect reality

Eva, alone and dying of grief, becomes extremely sick and begins accusing people of poisoning her

1996:

Ange (14 going on 15) begins high school

1998:

Eva (62) dies, leaving her wealth to Ange (17 and a half but she likes to say she’s 18)

Ikuko acquires Eva’s diary and holds a witch hunter convention to unveil it. At the last minute she refuses to show it and walks out. This permanently defuses the enthusiasm around the Rokkenjima mystery by reminding the would-be witch hunters that what they are doing is nothing more than desecrating the memories of the dead

Ange (17 and a half but she likes to say she’s 18) attempts to contact Tohya (30). Tohya is too scared to see her directly but she meets with Ikuko who gives her the key to Eva’s diary and allows her to read the truth. She is driven completely into despair and jumps off the roof of a skyscraper but survives by landing in the safety netting. Metafictionally she goes on a vision quest to reconcile herself to the truth and become a witch of resurrection

After surviving the fall, Ange (17 and a half but she likes to say she’s 18) gives up the Ushiromiya fortune and adopts the new identity Kotobuki Yukari. She spends the rest of her life writing children’s books to pass on the lessons she’s learned

In an alternate timeline after surviving the fall Ange (17 and a half but she likes to say she’s 18) travels to Rokkenjima while accompanied by Amakusa, a bodyguard given to her by President Okonogi, and hunted by Kyrie’s younger sister Sumadera Kasumi. Shortly before reaching the island she deduces that Okonogi has cut a deal with the Sumaderas and Amakusa plans to kill both her and Kasumi in the isolated location. In order to save herself, she kills Amakusa before he has the opportunity. She embraces the mantle of the witch of truth and sets off on a journey to escape her fate for good, allowing the name Ushiromiya Ange to die just like in the main timeline

Decades Later

Ange uses her wealth from her career as a novelist to reestablish Fukuin House. When remodeling the building, she recreates the main hall of the Ushiromiya family mansion from memory even getting the artist who originally painted the portrait of Beatrice to create a duplicate for her

Tohya finally overcomes his fear of meeting his sister and identifies Kotobuki Yukari as Ange. He reaches out to her and the two are reunited at last. Metafictionally, Battler and Sayo reach the golden land and are freed from purgatory, ascending to heaven

[ebanatsu]

How old is the cast in wmebsd? Umineko tells us their relative ages (Krauss is 2 years older than Eva who's 3 years older than Natsuhi) but not when they were born so there's room to shift their ages up and down a bit for narrative convenience. (Rudolf and Rosa have a little more evidence and can be inferred to have been born in 41 and 53 respectively)

sorry for taking a little while to answer this, it involves numbers and MATH. I'll start by saying their ages in wmebsd is one of those things i kind of purposely left a little vague, since we ourselves in the canon source don't have any confirmed years for all of them. The best we can do is take what little information the story does give us and work around that.

Eva says herself she's 3 years older than Natsuhi, and I don't remember if it's ever actually stated anywhere that Krauss is 2 years older than Eva, but i do have a very vague memory of that being mentioned somewhere? maybe the manga. If you have an exact moment where it's said, please share it with me because i've always had this memory of seeing it but can't remember where it was. With that in mind, I think most people generally figure Eva's about 50, so Krauss would be 52 and Natsuhi 47. The story takes place in 1986, and Jessica is 18, but it took Natsuhi 12 years to have her in the first place, so that's 30 years right there. This would put the year at 1956 and Natsuhi at 17.

Now, this is just assuming Natsuhi is 47, she could be older than that, but working with these numbers in mind, I think it's a pretty good estimate. It also wouldn't surprise me if she was married in only at 17 :/ Or she was married in pretty much right after graduating school, so 18. Given all that, though, I will say in wmebsd, I always intended that Natsuhi is at least 18 years old. Definitely 18-20.

I'll admit, for the case of Rudolf and Rosa, back when I first started wmebsd, I hadn't really stopped to take the time to try and estimate their ages as much, and rather I actually just took inspiration from a lot of other fanworks at the time. (I assume the listed years you gave for when they were born has to do with years involving when Kinzo moved them all to Rokkenjima and working with that in mind? Please clarify if you don’t mind, as I’m quite intrigued actually, but don’t remember all the established years the game does give us </3)

If Rudolf was born in 1941, that means he would be around 15 in 1956, but I always age him up in my mind and have him closer to Natsuhi's and Eva's age. If Rosa was born in 1953, then that would make her about 3 in 1956, which is actually a little bit younger than I imagined when writing the fic, but accurate in that she is supposed to be very young.

With all the canon guesstimating out of the way, it’s pretty clear it’s still quite difficult trying to pinpoint exact ages and years. I do wish Ryukishi would give us confirmed numbers, but at the same time, it’s kind of nice having that little bit of room to work with. Even with all that in mind, I never actually said if wmebsd takes place in 1956, all I ever said in the fic was “She had only recently married into the Ushiromiya family”, but that could easily still be a around a full year, making it closer to 1957. Again, I kind of purposely left certain things a little vague to work with canon.

With all that in mind, and what I said about Rudolf and Rosa, I intended their ages to be something like this in wmebsd, give or take:

Natsuhi: 18-20

Eva: 21-23

Krauss: 23-25

Rudolf: 17-19

Rosa: 7-9

[cricketcat9]

Anniversary of Auschwitz liberation

today. I've been there many years ago, as a translator for Spanish TV crew, filming a documentary about concentration camps. After watching an archival footage from the liberation, we all, men and women, cried uncontrollably. An old man working at a stand selling books about Auschwitz showed us a yellowed photo from Rudolf Hoess execution as a war criminal, and said "I was a prisoner here. He's dead, and I'm alive". I've seen the mountain of clothing, an enormous pile of glasses, the hair, things described below. If you don't know about Auschwitz, or who Rudolf Hoess was, or what happened there - EDUCATE YOURSELF. You will understand better why there CAN'T BE ANY DIALOGUE WITH THE NAZIS.

From Wikipedia: "About 7,000 prisoners had been left behind, most of whom were seriously ill due to the effects of their imprisonment. Most of those left behind were middle-aged adults or children younger than 15. Red Army soldiers also found 600 corpses, 370,000 men's suits, 837,000 articles of women's clothing, and seven tonnes (7.7 tons) of human hair."

Edited to add: this is not an opportunity for a contest “who suffered most”, but you should know: the death toll includes 960,000 Jews (865,000 of whom were gassed on arrival), 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 other Europeans. Those not gassed died of starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions, or beatings. Others were killed during medical experiments. Categories of prisoner: political, criminals, asocial, which included vagrants, prostitutes and the Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, gay men, Jews. The nationality of the inmate was indicated by a letter stitched onto the cloth. A racial hierarchy existed, with German prisoners at the top. Next were non-Jewish prisoners from other countries. Jewish prisoners were at the bottom.

[thekillerblogofkillers]

Peter Kurten (1883-1931) PART TWO

On February 3, 1929, Kurten stalked an elderly woman, Apollonia Kuhn, waiting until she was hidden from view of witnesses by bushes before pouncing on her, dragging her to the ground where he stabbed her 24 times with a sharpened pair of scissors. Despite the fact that most of the wounds Kurten inflicted were bone-deep, Kuhn survived. On February 8, Kurten strangled 9-year-old Rosa Ohliger until she was unconscious, before stabbing her in the stomach, head, genitals and heart with scissors, ejaculating as he knifed the child and inserting his semen into her vagina with his fingers. He attempted to hide the girl’s body by dragging it under a hedge, before returning several hours later and pouring a bottle of kerosene over the corpse before setting it alight. He achieved orgasm watching the flames. Ohliger’s body was discovered the following day. On February 13, Kurten killed 45-year-old mechanic Rudolf Scheer in Flingen Nord, stabbing him 20 times in the head, back and eyes. After the discovery of Scheer’s body, Kurten returned to the murder scene and talked to police, falsely telling a detective he heard of the murder via telephone. Despite the differences in the ages of the 3 victims, the fact that all 3 crimes were committed in the Flingern district of Dusseldorf at dusk, that each of the victims had been stabbed repeatedly and at least once in the temple, as well as the lack of a motive such as robbery, led investigators to conclude that the same killer committed all 3 attacks. Kurten did attempted to strangle 4 women between March and July 1929, one of whom he later claimed to have thrown into the Rhine River, but he isn’t known to have killed any more victims until August 11 when he raped, strangled and repeatedly stabbed Maria Hahn. Kurten first met Hahn (whom he described as “a girl looking for marriage”) on August 8, and had arranged to take her on a date to the Neandertal district of Dusseldorf the following weekend. After a few hours in her company, Kurten lured Hahn into a meadow to kill her – he later admitted that she had begged for him to spare her. He raped, strangled and stabbed her in the chest and head for over an hour. Scared that his wife might connect the bloodstains on his clothes with Hahn’s murder, Kurten buried her body in a cornfield before returning weeks later with the intention of nailing her decomposing remains to a tree to shock and disgust the public. He couldn’t do this because her remains were too heavy. He later said he “went to the grave many times and kept improving on it; and every time I thought of what was lying there and was filled with satisfaction.” It was following the murder of Maria Hahn that Kurten changed his weapon of choice from scissors to a knife in order to try and convince police that more than one killer was responsible for the string of assaults and murders. In the early hours of August 21 Kurten stabbed an 18-year-old girl, a 30-year-old man and a 37-year-old woman in separate attacks – all 3 were seriously wounded and told police their assailant had been completely silent during their ordeals. 3 days later, at a fairground in Flehe, Kurten saw 2 foster sisters aged 5 and 14, walking home through adjoining allotments. He promised the older girl, Luise Lenzen, to buy him cigarettes on the promise of 20 pfennig and lifted the younger child, Gertrude Hamacher, off the ground by her neck and strangled her into unconsciousness before cutting her throat and dumping her body in a patch of runner beans. When Lenzen returned Kurten began to strangle her before stabbing her in the torso – 1 wound pierced her aorta. He bit and cut her throat before sucking blood from the wounds. Neither girl was sexually assaulted, and the fact that only Lenzen’s footprints were discovered within 7m of her body suggests she tried to run before collapsing. The next day, Kurten attacked 27-year-old housemaid Gertrude Schulte after she rejected his sexual advances, shouting “Well, die then!” before repeatedly stabbing her in the neck, shoulder, head and back. She survived her injuries, but couldn’t give investigators a clear description of her assailant beyond the fact that he appeared to be around 40.

Kurten attempted to kill 2 more victims – 1 by strangulation, another by stabbing – in September before choosing to use a hammer in the majority of his murders.  On September 30, Kurten met 31-year-old servant Ida Reuter at Dusseldorf station, successfully persuading her to go to a local cafe with him. afterwards, they walked through the local Hofgarten near the Rhine River, where he repeatedly hit her in the head with a hammer both before and after raping her. At one point in the assault Reuter regained consciousness and began begging for her life – in response, Kurten “gave her other hammer blows on the head, and misused her”. 11 days later he met 22-year-old servant Elizabeth Dorrier outside a theatre and again persuaded her to join him at a local cafe before taking the train to Grafenberg, where they walked near the Kleine Dussel river. Kurten hit her once across the right temple with a hammer before raping her and striking her repeatedly about the head and temples. He left her for dead. She was discovered at 6:30am the following morning and died from her injuries the following day, never waking from the coma in which she was found. On October 25, Kurten attacked 2 women with a hammer – both survived, but in the 2nd case this was only due to the fact that Kurten’s hammer broke. On November 7 1929 Kurten encountered 5-year-old Gertrude Albermann in Flingern, Dusseldorf. He convinced her to go to a deserted allotment with him, where he grabbed her by the throat and strangled her, stabbing her once in the temple with a pair of scissors as he did. When Albermann “collapsed to the ground without a sound”, Kurten stabbed her 34 more times in the temple and chest before leaving her body in a pile of nettles against a factory wall. By late 1929 the murders committed by the killer dubbed the Vampire of Dusseldorf were being given considerable national and international attention. Because of the savage nature of the crimes, as well as the diverse range of victims and the different methods which they were assaulted/murdered, both police and press believed there was more than 1 culprit. By the end of the year police had received over 13,000 letters from the public, with each lead painstakingly followed up. As a result, more than 9,000 people were interviewed, 2,650 clues were pursued and a list of 900,000 names would be compiled as a potential suspect list. 2 days after the murder of Gertrude Albermann, a local newspaper received a map showing the location of the grave of Maria Hahn. In the drawing, Kurten also revealed where he had left Albermann’s body, which had been discovered earlier that day, describing the position of the corpse, stating it would be found face-down among bricks and rubble. A handwriting analysis revealed that the author was the same person who had written to police on October 14 informing them he had killed Hahn and buried her body “at the edge of the woods. Each letter Kurten had previously sent to newspapers and police was examined by a graphologist, who confirmed the same individual had composed them all, leading Ernst Gennat, Chief Inspector of the Berlin Police, to conclude that just one man was responsible for the spate of assaults and murders. The murder of Albermann would be Kurten’s last, although he did commit a string of non-fatal hammer attacks and attempted strangulations between February and May 1930, injuring 10 victims. All survived and many managed to describe their assailant to police.

On May 14, 1930, an unknown man approached 20-year-old Maria Budlick at Dusseldorf station, and on discovering she had travelled from Koln looking for a job and a place to live, he offered to direct her to a local hostel. Budlick agreed to follow the man, but became nervous when he attempted to lead her through an empty park. The pair started to argue, whereupon a 2nd man approached, asking if Budlick was being bothered by the first man. When Budlick said yes, the individual she was arguing with just walked away. The man who came to Budlick’s aid was Peter Kurten. He invited the distressed woman to his apartment to eat and drink before Budlick, who had guessed his motivations, said she was not interested in having sex with him. Kurten offered to lead her to a hotel, but instead lured her into the Grafenburg woods, where he grabbed her by the throat and tried to strangle her during a rape. When Budlick started to scream, he released her throat and allowed her to leave. She did not report this assault to police, but described her ordeal in a letter to a friend – she addressed the letter incorrectly, so a mail clerk ended up opening it on May 19, and after reading the letter, forwarded it to the Dusseldorf police. It was read by Chief Inspector Gennat, who believed there was a chance that Budlick’s assailant was the Dusseldorf murderer. He interviewed Budlick, who stated that one of the reasons she was spared was because she had lied and said she couldn’t remember his address – she agreed to lead police to Kurten’s home, and took them to his Mettmanner Straβe address. When the landlady led Budlick into Kurten’s room, she confirmed to Chief Inspector Gennat that this was the address of the man who raped her. The landlady confirmed the tenant’s name was Peter Kurten. Although Kurten wasn’t alone when Budlick and Chief Inspector Gennat searched the property, he did see them in the hallway and promptly left. Knowing that the police now knew who he was, and suspecting they had connected him to the crimes committed by the Vampire of Dusseldorf, Kurten confessed to his wife about raping Budlick, telling her that because of his prior convictions he might receive 15 years’ penal labour. With his wife’s agreement, he found a place to stay in the Adlerstraβe area of Dusseldorf and didn’t return to his own home until May 23. When he did return, he told his wife he was the Vampire of Dusseldorf and he urged her to collect the large reward offered for his capture. Auguste Kurten called police the following day. In the information she gave to detectives, she explained that although she had known her husband had been in prison many times before, she didn’t know anything about the murders, adding that he confessed to her and was also willing to confess to police. She told them she would be meeting her husband outside St. Rochus church later that day. Peter Kurten was arrested at gunpoint.

[shailendra65631]

Groundbreaking math devised at NASA Ames for use in the Apollo navigation computers became a standard tool in many fields, including air traffic management. The son of its inventor remembers his father’s important work.

July 18, 2019

They say the computers on board the Apollo spacecraft were not even as powerful as your smartphone. So, how did they travel all that way, perform complex maneuvers in space and return through Earth’s atmosphere at just the right angle to splash down in the Pacific Ocean?

Greg Schmidt knows an important part of the answer is based in math. He heard all about it from his father, Stanley Schmidt, who developed powerful computational techniques at NASA’s Ames Research Center, in California’s Silicon Valley, even before the Apollo program was ramping up. After a childhood steeped in this history, Greg grew up to become the director of NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, based at Ames.

He remembers the story well.

“My father had been assigned the problem of navigating to the Moon and, as he told it to me, it was a very difficult problem,” said Schmidt. “They didn’t have a mathematical solution to it. It involved taking a number of different sources of information and combining them in an optimal way to get the best estimate of where your spacecraft is at any time, how fast you’re going and other variables, too.”

The calculations needed to be something the computers on board the Apollo capsule could tackle with their limited, 1960s-era computing power. The elder Schmidt, who was chief of the Ames Dynamic Analysis Branch when NASA was studying the feasibility of its future lunar missions, knew of work done a few years earlier by a mathematician named Rudolf Kalman.

“My dad invited Rudy Kalman to give a lecture at Ames, and when he did, Dad had an epiphany,” the younger Schmidt explained. “Kalman had written a paper about a theoretical ‘linear’ solution to estimating a vehicle’s location and speed."

"The problem was that this was a fundamentally ‘nonlinear’ problem; that’s like the difference in complexity between floating down a lazy river and going over a waterfall, where your motion becomes chaotic and unpredictable," he said. "My dad then developed the equations for how to solve this nonlinear problem – a major extension of Kalman’s work."

And an answer that would guide the astronauts safely to the Moon and home again.

Today, the approach underlying those historic space flights is used in applications across our lives, even helping direct air traffic to increase efficiency in our busy skies. The two scenarios have related problems to solve, and the innovative math that came to be called the Schmidt-Kalman filter provides the answers.

From Apollo to the Airport: The Schmidt-Kalman Filter at WorkAt airports across the country, the demand for flights is growing, so NASA is working with partners like the Federal Aviation Administration to research ways of directing that traffic as efficiently as possible. Today at Ames, research teams are developing air traffic management systems that help things go smoothly in all phases of flight: takeoff, cruise and landing.

One principle that helps get more passengers on their way is to release additional planes for takeoff at the right moments. Knowing when that's safe to do has something in common with the challenge of navigating to the Moon: You need to estimate as accurately as possible the positions of many different aircraft – or of one very special spacecraft – and to work with the uncertainty that all measurements contain. And that’s where the Schmidt-Kalman filter comes in.

Any way you measure an aircraft’s position, it comes with a degree of uncertainty. That’s simply because no tool can measure something perfectly and there are a lot of factors influencing a plane in flight: wind speed, weather, pilot performance... So, neither aircraft tracking systems based on radar and GPS measurements nor sophisticated calculations of your plane’s expected flight path can pinpoint exact coordinates; they’re really saying your plane is located somewhere within a certain limited zone. The smaller that zone, the more confident you can be that your craft’s estimated position is as close to reality as possible.

The technique works, in our example, by fusing those two methods of estimating position: calculating a predicted flight path and using real-life measurements. This lets the Schmidt-Kalman filter narrow the window of possibilities for a plane’s location and gives an answer that is stronger than either method alone. It’s called a filter because it also removes “noise,” or extra, meaningless data, from the measurements. And it’s even able to tell you when to trust the equations more and when to have more faith in your measurements, shifting the balance in how much weight it gives each part to perform its analysis.

“In air traffic management, the job is to keep aircraft safe and separated,” said Jeremy Coupe, an aerospace engineer in guidance, navigation and control systems at Ames. “If you have a very accurate idea of where every aircraft is, you can increase the number of flights in a given area. But if you don’t have a good idea, you can’t be sure how to safely pack more of them into the airspace.”

So, the FAA took a cue from Apollo: To help improve that accuracy in estimating positions, the FAA added Schmidt-Kalman filters to the calculations performed by their aircraft-tracking systems.

+++

“I’m immensely proud of what my father did,” said Greg Schmidt. “Before he passed away, I remember being at the hospital talking with him about his work. He was barely even able to talk, but recounted all the equations as clearly as if it were 50 years earlier. He was a truly amazing man.”

Driven by those studies of spacecraft navigation in the 1960s, Stanley Schmidt’s contributions turned a theory into something essential for the success of Apollo. And, today, he’s still helping you fly to your destination – safely and on time.

In the late 1950s, before the Apollo program was under way, Stanley Schmidt was chief of the Ames Dynamic Analysis Branch at NASA’s Ames Research Center. He was challenged to devise a way for computers of the era to process vast amounts of data in real time accurately enough to direct a spacecraft to and from the Moon. Schmidt developed powerful mathematical techniques now called the Schmidt-Kalman filter that reduced the computational complexity of the problem. His method helped the Apollo missions reach the Moon and became a standard tool in many fields, including air traffic management.

Learn more:

Stanley F. "Stan" Schmidt Oral History Interviews from the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project (July 15, 2014)

Author: Abby Tabor

Last Updated: July 19, 2019Editor: Abigail TaborTags:  

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[autodidact-adventures]

World War I (Part 4): The Hapsburgs

The first known Hapsburg was Guntram the Rich, a member of the noble Etichonid family.  He lived during the 900's, and was a count in Breisgau (SW Germany).

In 1273, one of Guntram's descendants became the first Hapsburg monarch – King Rudolf I of Germany.  His eldest son, Albert I, succeeded him on the German throne in 1298.  His second son, Rudolf II, ruled Austria as the Duke of Austria from 1282-83.  He shared this title with Albert I, who succeeded him.

After this, the Hapsburgs were always royal, and always ruled various countries.  Their kingships included Austria, Germany, Bohemia, Hungary and Spain.  They would be emperors for over 4.5 centuries (with short interruptions).  They would reach their peak in the 1500's, dominating Europe and the New World.

The rulers of Germany had fancied the idea of being successors to the Ancient Roman Emperors ever since 800.  This was when Charlemagne (Karl der Grosse to the Germans), the barbarian chief of the Franks (a Germanic tribe) went to Rome and had himself crowned Emperor Charles.

Before that, in the 300's & 400's, the Franks had overrun the Roman Empire, and gained control of most of what is now Italy.  They continued to control this territory even through into modern times.

The greatest honour for a German was to be named Holy Roman Emperor. This title made him overall head of all the fragmented German states, even though it didn't allow him to control Rome.

Frederick III (1415-1493) was the last German Emperor to be crowned in Rome, in 1440, and the second-last Emperor to be crowned by the Pope.  He was a member of the Hapsburg family's Austrian branch.  The German throne was “elective” – only the hereditary rulers of major German states (including Austria) could vote.  The Hapsburgs held the German throne until 1711.

Frederick III was also crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1452 – the first Hapsburg to become the HRE.

And he was also the first Hapsburg to have the famous “Hapsburg lip”, which he apparently inherited from his mother.  This protruberance of the lower lip and jaw, sometimes an extremely large one, was from inbreeding.  The Hapsburgs were having trouble finding spouses who were “worthy” of them, so they married each other more & more often.

The Hapsburgs tended to gain wealth and territory through marriage rather than war – the Latin saying Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube means “Let others wage wars; you, happy Austria, marry.”

Frederick III was extremely successful at this practice.  He married his second son Maximilian I (the eldest, Christoph, had died as a baby) to Mary of Burgundy, who was the heiress of the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Artois & Burgundy regions of modern France. (Maximilian I's second wife was Bianca Maria Sforza, daughter of the duke of Milan.)

Then, Frederick married Maximilian's son Philip I (also called Philip the Handsome) to Isabella I & Ferdinand II's eldest daughter & heir, Joanna of Castile (also called Joanna the Mad).  Joanna became Queen of Castile from 1504, and of Aragon from 1516.  With this marriage, the Hapsburgs gained Spain, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, and all of Spain's possessions in the New World.

Their eldest son, Emperor Charles V, inherited all of this, and also gained Portugal and Milan.  He ruled more of the world than any man had done before then, but it was too much to deal with.  So he divided it up.

His eldest son Philip II (1527-98) became King of Spain.  His second wife (of four) was Mary I.  Charles V's brother, the Emperor Ferdinand I, became the Holy Roman Emperor, and controlled the eastern, German region.

But after that, things started going downhill.  The Spanish line died out a few generations later due to inbreeding (which also weakened the German line, but didn't end it).  “Insanity” also came into the family, inherited from Joanna of Castile.  Charles II (1630-1685) was the last Hapsburg King of Spain, and he married three times but had no children.

The Austrian line did much better, but still had a lot of problems. Louis XIV took all the Hapsburg possessions west of the Rhine, including the provinces of Alsace & Lorraine.  The Ottomans invaded Europe and conquered most of the Balkans; they actually reached the gates of Vienna twice before being turned back.

Then the Reformation happened, and Catholic Austria became the enemy of newly-Protestant northern Germany.  This was great for Prussia (the leading Protestant state in Europe), which seized important pieces of Hapsburg territory.

During the Napoléonic Wars (1803-15), Napoléon occupied Vienna twice, and seized many of the Hapsburgs' southern possessions.  He also took a Hapsburg princess, a grand-niece of Marie Antoinette, as his bride.

Napoléon's successes ended the “fiction” of the Holy Roman Empire.  From then on, the Hapsburg monarchs were just Emperors of Austria.  After Napoléon's fall, the Congress of Vienna (1814-15) attempted to restore the old order of Europe, and some of the Hapsburgs' most important southern possessions were returned to them, including northern Italy.  For the next 30yrs, things went relatively peacefully.

But then in 1848, revolutions erupted across Europe, with the people demanding reform.  Most of the major cities in the Hapsburg empire revolted, and for a while it was uncertain if the dynasty would survive.  The Emperor Ferdinand I abdicated.  His younger brother, the Archduke Franz Karl, was next in line, but the throne went instead to his son, Franz Joseph I, who was 18yrs old.  The royalists hoped that he could win the loyalty of their subjects, and he succeeded in this.

Franz Joseph married Elizabeth of Bavaria, and they had four children.  However, he contracted gonorrhea on one of his Italian campaigns, and passed it onto her.  This was basically the end of their marriage (although unofficially).

In 1859, Italian nationalists drove Austria out of Lombardy.  Not long afterwards, Austria lost Tuscany and Modena, too.

In 1866, Austria lost the Austro-Prussian War, and were forced to abandon their ancient claim to ruling Germany.

In 1867, Franz Joseph negotiated with Hungary, and Austria-Hungary was created.  In this new state, Hungary wasn't just one of Austria's possessions, but its equal partner in a new dual monarchy.  The ruler of Austria-Hungary would be Emperor of Austria and the “apostolic king” of Hungary.  The two countries would have their own separate prime ministers & parliaments, but the finance, foreign affairs and war ministries would be centralized in Vienna.

This was a step up for the Magyars (who dominated Hungary), and it gave them a reason to want the empire to survive.  But it also caused complications.  All important policy decisions had to be approved in Vienna and Budapest.  Also, Hungary didn't want anything to weaken their position, and thus they resisted the dual monarchy being turned into a triple one with the Slavs, even though by 1914, 3/5 of the empire's subjects were Slavs (including Serbs, Slovaks, Czechs, Poles and Ukrainians).

Also in 1867, Maximilian I (Franz Joseph's younger brother) was shot dead by a firing squad in Mexico.  Three years earlier, he'd accepted an invitation to go there and become its emperor.

In 1870, Prussia led the German states to victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War.  This led the unification of the states and the creation of the German Empire.  The King of Prussia became the Kaiser, and Austria was excluded from the rulership.  Germany had replaced Austria as the leader of the European powers, and Austria would henceforth be the lesser one in their partnership.

The Archduke Rudolf was Franz Joseph's only son, and the Crown Prince to the throne.  He was a drug addict and deeply troubled, and he had also contracted syphilis and infected his wife with it, making her sterile.  In 1889, he and his teenage mistress committed suicide together.  He left no male heir.

In 1898, Empress Elisabeth was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist.  He had wanted to kill King Umberto I of Italy, but failed to raise the train fare to Rome, so decided to kill her instead. Then two years later, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand insisted on marrying Sophie Chotek.  Their marriage was morganatic, with their children being excluded from the succession.

In 1914, Franz Joseph was 84yrs old, one of the longest-reigning monarchs in history.  He rose before dawn, said his morning prayers, and began working at 5am every day.  He was devoted to preserving his ancestors' traditions: they were his heritage, and there was no-one else to do so.  Sometimes he spoke of wishing to die: once he said to Conrad that “all are dying, only I can't die.”  Conrad replied that he was grateful for the emperor's long life, but Franz Joseph replied, “Yes, yes, but one is so alone then.”

[magpiedragon]

Elisabeth das Musical exposition/setting notes

Back when I was translating the ‘92 Vienna rehearsal footage to English I ended up digging deeper than I probably should have into lyrics, because I was kinda fascinated with how precisely you could pinpoint some of the songs in time that way.

I ended up including an extremely short summary of...fun trivia I learned as footnotes in my yt videos for Americans and other aliens (...kidding. kidding! Not like I really remember what was up with Spring of Nations either other than ‘Poland was there too’...) but since a) like nobody watches ‘92 Elisabeth b) if they do they are almost guaranteed not to read video descriptions anyway, I finally decided to repost this here.

Or, you know, you can check out @land-of-blitheness-and-catharsis Vienna Revival Elisabeth translations for some way more entertaining background comments.

PROLOG

[1] Luigi Lucheni (1873-1910) Italian anarchist famous for assassinating Empress Elisabeth of Austria in 1898. Died in 1910 by hanging himself in his cell while serving a life sentence in Geneva. Curiously enough, his head had been preserved in formaldehyde and only buried in 2000, 90 years after his death.

[2] Grammar bonus in case you live under a rock: German is a language with what is known as grammatical gender, effectively making the noun 'death' come with built-in male pronouns unless stated otherwise.

[3] "Why not? She loved Heinrich Heine!" Heinrich Heine (1797 – 1856) Born to a Jewish family but later converted to Christianity, German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic. Elisabeth was something of a fan, to put it mildly.

WIE DU

[4] "In this case, it's impossible." Elisabeth absolutely can't come with her father because, according to the libretto, he is actually on his way to spend a night with an actress in Monachium.

[5] "...with a zither under one arm" The flat, black box Elisabeth doesn't want to give back to her father is indeed a zither case.

JEDEM GIBT ER DAS SEINE

[6] Franz-Joseph I of Austria (1830 – 1916) The oldest of four brothers, ascended the throne in 1848 at the age of eighteen when, after his epileptic uncle's Ferdinand I abdication, his father stepped aside in his favor.

[7] "Russia, we owe rescue.../...from the revolution." In 1848 a wave of political upheavals swept across Europe, an event known as the Spring of Nations. Stuck between fighting in the territories of today's Italy and the rebelling Hungarians, who were at the time under the rule of the Austrian Empire, Austria lacked the power to quell the latter. Assistance from its ally, Russia, was sent for and the revolution suppressed.

[8] Crimean War (1853 - 1856) Military conflict fought between Russia and an alliance of France, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia started over the rights of Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire. Russia lost and apparently was none too happy about Austrian Empire choosing to remain neutral.

SIE PASST NICHT

[9] "Rauscher's speech was too long." Joseph Othmar Ritter von Rauscher (1797-1875), Cardinal and Austrian Prince-Archbishop of Vienna, considered the father of the Austrian Concordat of 1855. This will kinda keep coming up.

DER LETZTE TANZ

[10] "In mirror room" (der Spiegelsaal) Large mirrors used to be difficult to produce and thus very expensive. Naturally, for a while small rooms and galleries with mirrors embedded in the walls seem to have been a must-have in every grand residence.

DIE ERSTEN VIER JAHRE

[11] "Where does she stand on Hungary?" After the rebellion of 1848 Hungary wasn't exactly in the Austrian Empire's best books. A lot of its former independence was taken away.

DIE FRÖHLICHE APOKALYPSE

[12] "One more coffee!" Wiener Melange ("Viennese blend") is a type of coffee drink specific to Vienna, traditionally consisting of a shot of expresso topped with hot milk and milk foam.

[13] We've signed a concordat!" A concordat is convention between the Holy See and a sovereign state that defines the [..] privileges of the Catholic Church in a particular country. (Thanks wikipedia...) In the case of Austrian Concordat of 1855 the Church was granted full control over their direct affairs, oversight of approx 98% of public schools and their curriculum as well as jurisdiction over marriages where either or both the couple were Catholic. In other words something of a big deal and most liberals really weren't a fan.

[14] "The last Crimean War neutralized us.../And Austria is now.../ ...politically, completely isolated./[...]/And we are now at war with Piedmont!" In 1858 England and, more importantly, Russia, is definitely still sulking over Austrian Empire's neutrality in the Crimean War. In the meanwhile wars in what is today's Italy continue, notably with the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. Up until 1871 Italy was a collection of small kingdoms/city states. The Second Italian War of Independence of 1859 will prove to be a crucial part of their future unification.

[15] "...crowds of men waving their fists/at her on Ballhausplatz." The Ballhausplatz is a square in central Vienna and the location of the residence/set of office of the Chancellor of Austria. It's also located a short walk's distance from the Austrian Parliament building.

SCHÖNHEITSPFLEGE

[16] "Here, veal for the face./Lay it in thick slices on the cheeks.../[...]/The meat sauce, that she drinks at midday.../...has to, imagine.../...absolutely be from a fillet." etc Supposedly all true. She is also known for fasting, exercising rigorously and tight-lacing her corsets to a worrying degree.

WIR ODER SIE

[17] "A ringleader advanced.../...to a minister of state!" Likely refers to Count Gyula Andrássy (1823 – 1890), a Hungarian statesman who, in 1867, with Elisabeth's backing became Prime Minister of Hungary. By all accounts a close friend, thought to be lover by some.

[18] "...she rules like a Pompadour!" Madame de Pompadour (1721 – 1764) chief mistress of French king Louis XV and, later, his close friend and confidant. While having little official political influence, she was able to gather a network of supporters and wielded considerable power behind the scenes.

[19] "Instead of Goethe or Schiller.../...she recites Heine!" A serious offense indeed seeing as Goethe and Schiller are some of the most iconic/well-known German-language writers, while Heine's more radical works were banned.

[20] "I will, myself, undertake.../...delivering a Circe to him" In the Greek epic poem Odyssey, the hero Odysseus is steadfast and unrelenting in his attempt to return home to his faithul wife Penelope, except for that one entire year he spends feasting and sharing a bed of a powerful sorceress named Circe. Because why not.

MALADIE

[21] "One.../...known as the French disease." Anemia, fever and dizzy spells are not exactly the most prominent symptoms of secondary syphillis and Elisabeth's bad health is only speculated to be a result of a veneral disease instead of constant stress she was under, but I suppose we’ll just have to trust the personification of death on this one. You'd assume he'd know.

DIE RASTLOSEN JAHRE

[22] "Wants to Corfu, Pest and England..." Budapest is the capital and the largest city of Hungary. Originally two separate cities, Buda and Pest, it became a single city occupying both banks of the river Danube in 1873.

DIE SCHATTEN WERDEN LÄNGER

[23] "To the tune of the Pied Piper.../...they dance wildly..." "Der Rattenfänger von Hameln", better known in the Anglosphere as "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" is a German legend concerning a rat-catcher hired to lead rats away from the city of Hamelin using his magical flute. When the townsfolk refuse to give him the promised payment, he turns the magic on the town's children instead, luring them all into the unknown.

HASS

[24] "Nationalists! Supporters of Schönerer." Georg Ritter von Schönerer (1842 – 1921), German landowner, politician, rabid nationalist and antisemite. In 1888, he was temporarily jailed for ransacking a newspaper office and his popularity soared, with nationalist marches organized to demand freeing him etc. Likely the person to introduce Führer (”leader") to the nationalist vocabulary. All around a great guy like that. Hitler is said to have been a big fan as a young man.

[25] "Wilhelm should be Emperor!" Wilhelm II (1859 – 1941), the last German Emperor and Austrian nationalists' preferred Habsburg replacement.

[26] "For Heinrich Heine she wants to, here, in Vienna.../...erect a statue!" She really did, except by the time it was finished, the nationalist protests were so widespread there was nowhere to put it. Somehow, and don't ask me how or why, it is now located in Bronx, New York City and known as the Lorelei Fountain.

[27] "The Guard on the Rhine stands proud!" "Die Wacht am Rhein" is a famous patriotic German song, for a while considered something of an unofficial second anthem.

MAYERLING-WALZER

[28] Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria and his 17-year-old lover Baroness Mary Vetsera died on 30 January 1889 in what is widely considered to be a murder-suicide pact, known as the Mayerling Incident. His death caused Franz-Joseph I's nephew, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to become first in line to the throne of Austro-Hungarian Empire. Franz Ferdinand is perhaps best known as the man whose assassination in Sarajevo  in 1914 kickstarted the WWI.

AM DECK DER SINKENDEN WELT

[29] Maximillian I (1832 – 1867) Younger brother of Emperor Franz-Joseph. Accepted Napoleon III's offer to move to Mexico where he declared himself Emperor in 1864 and was executed by firing squad three years later.

[30] Maria von Wittelsbach (1841 - 1925) Elisabeth's younger sister. By all accounts a rather unhappy lady with an equally unhappy marriage.

[31] Ludwig von Wittelsbach (1845 – 1886) Elisabeth's cousin, king of Bavaria. Known as an eccentric with a love for extravagant artistic and architectural projects. Declared insane and deposed in 1886, died under unknown circumstances. Body found floating in a lake near his residence at the time.

[32] Sophie von Wittelsbach (1847 – 1897) Elisabeth's youngest sister, died in a fire of the Bazar de la Charité in Paris, during a charity event.

DER SCHLEIER FÄLLT

[33] Elisabeth, Empress of Austria died on the 10 September 1898 after being fatally stabbed in the heart with a stiletto improvised out of a sharpened needle file. Perhaps thanks to her practice of lacing her corsets very tightly the injury wasn't immediately detected and it took half an hour for her to die. Ironically, first recorded successful treatment of this exact kind of injury was achieved by dr Ludwig Rehn in Frankfurt am Main exactly two years and one day before that date.

...also something I failed to mention in footnotes, but occurs to me not everyone knows: yes, a porcelain tea set with portraits of Franz-Joseph and Elisabeth painted on it was not a very strange item to own. That’s kind of what Kitsch is about XD

[harryandmeghan0-blog]

Lee Radziwill, society grande dame and sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, dies at 85 - The Washington Post

New Post has been published on https://harryandmeghan.xyz/lee-radziwill-society-grande-dame-and-sister-of-jacqueline-kennedy-onassis-dies-at-85-the-washington-post/

Lee Radziwill, society grande dame and sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, dies at 85 - The Washington Post

By John Otis

February 16 at 3:39 PM

Lee Radziwill, who parlayed her cachet as the younger sister of former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis into a varied career as a fashion tastemaker, interior decorator, actress, princess and grande dame of cafe society on two continents, died Feb. 15 in New York. She was 85.

The death was confirmed by Cornelia Guest, a close friend. No other details were available.

Brought up amid great wealth in the Bouvier and Auchincloss families, Ms. Radziwill was raised with her sister in mansions along the East Coast.

She famously floundered as an actress and obtained the empty title of princess only after exchanging vows with an exiled Polish nobleman, her second of three husbands. But her adventurous spirit, sophisticated looks, husky voice and glamorous association with the Kennedy White House put her on magazine covers and on televisions while opening doors to royal palaces, gala soirees, torrid romances and touchstone events of the 1960s and ’70s.

Her most enduring influence was as a queen of style. Even before her sister married John F. Kennedy and became first lady in 1961, the fashion press began taking note of Ms. Radziwill’s chic looks that often featured clean lines, oversize sunglasses and free-flowing hair. Vogue magazine credited her with helping U.S. fashion transition from the stodgy elegance of the 1950s to a more relaxed and confident style.

She worked as an assistant to longtime Harper’s Bazaar editor Diana Vreeland, ran the American fashion pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair and inspired designers such as Yves Saint Laurent and Marc Jacobs. After seeing a photograph of Ms. Radziwill walking her dog in the 1960s, designer Michael Kors dubbed a throwback collection, that included balmacaan coats and stovepipe velvet slacks, “the Lee Radziwill look.”

Lee Radziwill, left, with her niece, Caroline Kennedy, in 2001. (Don Pollard/handout via AP)

The writer Truman Capote said she outshined her more-famous sister. “She’s all the things people give Jackie credit for,” he told People magazine in 1976. “All the looks, style, taste — Jackie never had them at all, and yet it was Lee who lived in the shadow.”

Gossip columnists and books, including Diana DuBois’s 1995 unauthorized biography “In Her Sister’s Shadow: An Intimate Biography of Lee Radziwill,” insisted she was forever jealous of her internationally revered sibling. DuBois even said that Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who married Jacqueline after her first husband was assassinated, was originally Ms. Radziwill’s conquest until the day in 1963 when she invited her sister along to sail on his yacht.

Onassis “was dynamic, irrational, cruel I suppose, but fascinating,” she told the New York Times in 2013. “He also had the most beautiful skin, and smelled wonderful. Naturally, I mean. Fascinating . . . as my sister discovered!” Ms. Radziwill always denied a rivalry.

During the Kennedy administration, the two sisters were confidants and traveling companions. They dined at Buckingham Palace and toured India, riding elephants and hobnobbing with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Ms. Radziwill spent much of the Cuban missile crisis holed up in the White House with Jacqueline and watching the president exchange tense phone calls with aides.

“I can’t deny those few years were glamorous, being on the presidential yacht for the America’s Cup races, the parties with the White House en fête. It was so ravishing,” she told the Times.

Lee Radziwill walks up the Spanish Steps in Rome in 1969. (United Press International/United Press International)

By the time Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, she was an A-list socialite in her own right and often called “Princess Radziwill” thanks to her marriage in 1959 to Prince Stanislas Albert “Stash” Radziwill, who had fled Poland after World War II to become a London real estate developer.

She danced at Capote’s legendary Black and White masquerade ball in 1966, sometimes called “the party of the century,” and joined other celebrity hangers-on during the Rolling Stones’s infamously debauched 1972 U.S. tour. Lead guitarist Keith Richards, who was unimpressed, dubbed her: “Princess Radish.”

Always restless, Ms. Radziwill, as People magazine put it, tried “on careers like so many Halstons.” With Capote providing acting tips and Saint Laurent a rack of dresses, Ms. Radziwill debuted in a 1967 Chicago stage production of “The Philadelphia Story.” She played snooty socialite Tracy Lord, the role made famous by Katharine Hepburn, but critics panned her performance as stilted. One reviewer succinctly noted, “A star is not born.”

The next year, Capote adapted the Vera Caspary suspense novel “Laura” for an ABC-TV production with Ms. Radziwill in the title role. But the reviews were even more brutal, calling the actress a pale comparison to Gene Tierney in the first-rate 1944 film version.

None of this dimmed Ms. Radziwill’s allure in high society. Her pencil-thin physique, long neck and elongated mouth graced magazine covers and photographs by Richard Avedon. Another friend, Andy Warhol, captured her elegance in an orange silk-screen portrait. Her closest friend was Russian ballet superstar Rudolf Nureyev, and she was romantically linked to other dashing men of the era, including architect Richard Meier and photographer and artist Peter Beard.

In 1976, she set up an interior decorating business in New York with a contract to design suites for Americana Hotels. She also worked as an event planner and style counselor to Giorgio Armani and was a fixture on the cocktail party and fashion show circuits of London, Paris and New York. Even into her 80s Ms. Radziwill was making best-dressed lists while her expensively outfitted apartments were featured in architecture and design magazines.

“For more than a half-century, she was a central figure in the comings and goings of high society,” Vogue magazine wrote in a 2014 tribute. “A story about the frivolity of the 20th century should obligatorily dedicate at least one full chapter and numerous scattered mentions to Lee Radziwill.”

Caroline Lee Bouvier was born in New York on March 3, 1933. Her father, John “Black Jack” Bouvier III, was a wealthy stockbroker notorious for his womanizing and heavy drinking. Her mother, Janet Norton Lee, hailed from a prominent Southern family.

After divorcing, her mother was married in 1942 to Washington businessman and Standard Oil heir Hugh D. Auchincloss Jr., stepfather of the author Gore Vidal.

The Bouvier sisters, raised in large part by governesses, attended the private Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Conn. Unhappy after her parents’ divorce, the future princess said she grew so lonely that at age 11 she tried to adopt an orphan.

She claimed her parents doted on Jacqueline, who was four years older, a bookworm and a better equestrian, while Lee, who was once thrown from a horse and trampled, was afraid of the animals. “My mother endlessly told me I was too fat, that I wasn’t a patch on my sister,” she told the Times.

But like her sister, Lee was considered a classic beauty and named debutante of the year by the Hearst newspaper chain when she “came out” in 1950, the year of her Miss Porter’s graduation. She enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College north of New York City but, professing a strong dislike for academics, left after her sophomore year to study art in Italy.

She and Jacqueline spent the summer of 1951 touring Europe, a trip that they turned into a book with illustrations by her older sister called, “One Special Summer,” which was published in 1974.

Lee wrote a second memoir, in 2001, called “Happy Times,” but her glamorous life was also marred by failed relationships and personal tragedy. Her first marriage, to Michael Canfield, son of the eminent book publishing executive Cass Canfield, collapsed, in part, because of his heavy drinking and her burgeoning relationship with Stanislas Radziwill; they wed in 1959 and divorced in 1974.

Her planned wedding to San Francisco hotelier and bon vivant Newton Cope was called off at the last minute, reportedly over differences involving a prenuptial agreement.

In 1988, she married film director and choreographer Herbert Ross, later telling the Times, “He was certainly different from anybody else I’d been involved with, and the film world sounded exciting. Well, it wasn’t.” And she said he was obsessed with the design tastes of his late wife, ballerina Nora Kaye. Ms. Radziwill and Ross divorced in 2001, shortly before his death.

She had two children with Prince Radziwill. Their son, Emmy Award-winning TV news producer Anthony Radziwill, died of a rare form of cancer in 1999 just weeks after her nephew, John F. Kennedy Jr., with whom she was close, died in a plane crash. Survivors include a daughter, Anna Christina “Tina” Radziwill. Information on other survivors was not immediately available.

Forever linked to the former first lady, Ms. Radziwill once told People that she had forged her own identity.

“I’ve been far more successful than I ever imagined,” she said. “I’m nobody’s kid sister.”

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/lee-radziwill-society-grande-dame-and-sister-of-jacqueline-kennedy-onassis-dies-at-85/2019/02/16/5044c540-3220-11e9-86ab-5d02109aeb01_story.html

[queenoffishingandcookies]

Random list of Umineko character ages as of 1986:

- this is mostly headcanon. By this, I mean the ages for the adults - we don’t have canon years or birth for anyone but the cousins, this is just my estimation. That's why the year next to their names are in italics - I don't actually know what they are.

- I’m less surprised at the age difference between the siblings, and more so at Kinzo’s fertility. He was in his early fifties (at the most) when Rosa was born, possibly younger. He had to be around adulthood (18-21) by the time the Kanto Earthquake (1923) happens - so at his oldest he’s born in 1899/1900 and at his youngest, he’d be born in 1905.

- also, I’m working off the assumption that Kumasawa, Nanjo, Genji, and Kinzo are relatively in the same age range (their eighties).

The Adults:

Kinzo: 87 (Aug 17, 1899)

Krauss: 55 (Feb 26, 1931)

Natsuhi: 50 (Jul 30th, 1936)

Eva: 52, turning 53 (Oct 21st, 1933).

Hideyoshi: 56, turning 57 (November 25th, 1929)

Rudolf: 45 (September 4, 1941)

Kyrie: 44, turning 45 (November 8th, 1941)

Rosa: 34 (June 3rd, 1952)

The Cousins:

George: 23 (March 16th, 1963), works with Hideyoshi as an aide

Battler: 18 (July 15th, 1968), 3rd Year High School

Jessica: 18 (August 25th, 1968), 3rd Year High School

Maria: 9 (March 29th, 1977), Fourth Grade, Elementary

Ange: 6 (June 17th, 1980), Starts Elementary next year

The Staff:

Genji: 85 (June 10, 1901), head butler of the Ushiromiya Mansion

Nanjo: 84 (April 5th 1902), Kinzo's physician

Kumasawa: 83 (July 19th, 1903), servant

Shannon: 16 (May 25th, 1970), servant

Kanon: 15, turning 16 (October 6th, 1970), servant

Gohda: 49, turning 50 (December 10th, 1936), Cook

*I placed Kanon at age fifteen, because I'm working off the assumption that Jessica is rounding his age a little bit when introducing him to Battler. His birthday is literally two days away, it would be easier to just say sixteen. There's always the possibility that he's turning seventeen, but wouldn't Jessica have said they were a year apart, then?

*also, Kanon calls Shannon 'nee-san'. Though it's mentioned by Shannon they aren't blood-related and Kanon does so out of respect towards Shannon, again I'm operating under the idea that he's actually a few months younger than her.

*Considering Gohda was initially meant to have an affair with Natsuhi before the concept was scrapped, I'm putting him around the same age as her.

[ecec333]

Konrad Kujau - rich on forgeries ....: Konrad Paul Kujau (27 June 1938 – 12 September 2000) was a German illustrator and forger. He became famous in 1983 as the creator of the so-called Hitler Diaries, for which he received DM 2.5 million from a person who in turn sold it for DM 9.3 million to the magazine Stern. The forgery resulted in a four-and-half year prison sentence. "Konny" Kujau was born in Löbau, Nazi Germany, one of five children of Richard Kujau, a cobbler, and his wife, both of who had joined the Nazi Party in 1933. Kujau's early life was of unremitting poverty and his mother was obliged to send her children into orphanages for periods of time. The boy grew up believing in the Nazi ideals and idolising Adolf Hitler; the defeat to the Allies in 1945 and Hitler's suicide did not temper his enthusiasm for the Nazi cause. He held a series of menial jobs until 1957, when he was working as a waiter at the Löbau Youth Club and a warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with the theft of a microphone. In June he fled to Stuttgart, West Germany where he soon drifted into temporary menial work and petty crime.[1][2] In 1959 he was fined 80 Marks (DM) for stealing tobacco; in 1960 he was sent to prison for nine months after being caught breaking into a storeroom to steal cognac; in 1961 he spent more time in prison after stealing five crates of fruit; six months later he was arrested after getting into a fight with his employer while employed as a cook in a bar.[3]

In 1961 he began a relationship with Edith Lieblang, one of the waitresses at the bar where he was working. The couple moved to Plochingen and opened a dance bar, which was a modest success. Kujau began to create a fictional background for himself, telling people his real name was Peter Fischer, changing his date of birth by two years, and altering the history of his time in East Germany.[4] by 1963 the bar began suffering financial difficulties, and the couple moved back to Stuttgart, where Kujau found work as a waiter. He also started his career as a counterfeiter, forging DM 27 worth of luncheon vouchers; he was caught and sentenced to five days in prison. On his release he and his wife formed the Lieblang Cleaning Company, although the company provided little income for them. In March 1968, at a routine check at Kujau's lodgings, the police established he was living under a false identity, after the name, address and date of birth details Kujau provided for the police were different to those on the papers he was carrying at the time. At the police station he offered a third set of details and a false explanation as to why he was masquerading under an assumed identity, but the subsequent fingerprint check confirmed he was Kujau. He was sent to Stuttgart's Stammheim Prison.[5][6]

On his release in the late 1960s the cleaning business was profitable enough for the couple to buy a flat in Schmieden[clarification needed], near Stuttgart.[7] In 1970 Kujau visited his family in East Germany and found out that many of the locals held Nazi memorabilia, contrary to the laws of the Communist government. Kujau saw an opportunity to buy the materiel cheaply on the black market, and make a profit in the West, where there was an increasing demand, the prices among Stuttgart collectors being up to ten times the prices paid by Kujau.[8] The trade was illegal in East Germany, and the export of what were deemed items of cultural heritage was banned. Both the Kujaus were stopped, although only once each, and with no penalty but the confiscation of the contraband.[7][9]

Among the items smuggled out of East Germany were weapons, and Kujau would occasionally wear a pistol, sometimes firing it in a nearby field, or shooting empty bottles in his local bar. One night in February 1973, while drunk, he took a loaded machine gun to confront a man he thought had been slashing the tyres of the cleaning company van. The man ran off and Kujau chased him into the wrong doorway, where he terrified a prostitute; her screams brought the police who arrested Kujau. When they searched his flat they found five pistols, a machine gun, a shotgun and three rifles. Kujau apologised and was given a fine.[10]

In 1974 Kujau rented a shop into which he placed his Nazi memorabilia; the outlet also became the venue for late-night drinking sessions with friends and fellow collectors, including Wolfgang Schulze, a resident of the US, who became Kujau's American agent.[11] Kujau soon began to raise the value of items in his shop by forging additional authentication details, including for a genuine First World War helmet, worth a few marks, for which Kujau forged a note saying it had been Hitler's, worn in Ypres in late October 1914, to radically raise its value. In addition to notes by Hitler, he produced documents in the handwriting of Martin Bormann, Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels. Although the handwriting was a passable imitation of the owners, the rest of the work was crude: Kujau used modern stationery, which he aged with tea, and created letterheads by using Letraset.[12][13] In many cases the spelling and grammar was inaccurate, particularly when he forged in English, such as a copy of the Munich Agreement between Hitler and Neville Chamberlain, which read:

    "We regard the areement signet last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another againe."[13]

In the mid- to late-1970s Kujau, an able amateur artist, turned to producing paintings which he claimed were by Hitler, who had also been an amateur artist in his younger days.[a] Having found a market for his forged works, Kujau painted subjects his buyers professed an interest in, such as cartoons, nudes and men in action—all subjects that Hitler never painted, or would want to paint. Often these paintings were accompanied by small notes purportedly from Hitler but forged by Kujau; the paintings were profitable for the forger. To explain his access to the memorabilia he invented several sources in East Germany, including a former Nazi general, the bribable director of a museum and his brother, a general in the East German army.[15]

Having found success in passing off his forged notes as those of Hitler, Kujau grew more ambitious and copied, by hand, the text from both volumes of Mein Kampf, even though the originals were completed by typewriter. Kujau also produced an introduction to a third volume of the work. He sold these "manuscripts" to one of his regular clients, Fritz Stiefel, a collector of Nazi memorabilia.[16][b] Kujau also began forging a series of war poems by Hitler, which were so amateurish that Kujau later admitted that "a fourteen-year-old collector would have recognized it as a forgery".[17] When some of those poems were published in 1980, one historian pointed out that one of the poems could not have been produced by Hitler as it had been written by Herybert Menzel.[18] Hitler diaries

It is unclear when Kujau produced his first Hitler diary. Stiefel says Kujau gave him a diary on loan in 1975. Schulze puts the date in 1976, while Kujau says he began in 1978. He used one of a pile of notebooks he had bought cheaply in East Berlin, and put the letters AH in gold on the front, although these letters were purchased in a department store, made of plastic in Hong Kong, and he used FH, rather than AH. To add a further look of authentication, he took the black ribbon from a real SS document, and attached it to the cover using a German army wax seal. For the ink he purchased two bottles of Pelikan ink, one black and one blue, and mixed the two together with water so it flowed more easily from the cheap modern pen he used. Kujau had spent a month practicing to write in the old German gothic script in which Hitler used to write. Kujau showed it to Stiefel who was impressed by the work, and wanted to buy it, but when the forger refused to sell it, he asked to borrow it instead, which was agreed upon.[19][20]

In 1978 Kujau sold his first "Hitler Diary" to a collector. In 1980 he was contacted by the journalist Gerd Heidemann who had learned of the diary. Kujau told Heidemann that the diaries were in the possession of his brother, who was a general in the East German Army. Heidemann made a deal with Kujau for "the rest" of the diaries.[21] Over the next two years Kujau faked a further 61 volumes and sold them to Heidemann for DM 2.5 million. Heidemann in turn received DM 9 million from his employers at Stern.[21] On their publication in 1983, the diaries were soon proved to be fabrications and Heidemann and Kujau were arrested.[21] In August 1984 Kujau was sentenced to four and a half years for forgery and Lieblang to one year as an accomplice. Heidemann was convicted of fraud and also received a four-and-half year prison sentence the following year.[22]

On his release from prison after three years, Kujau became something of a minor celebrity appearing on TV as a "forgery expert" and set up a business selling "genuine Kujau fakes" in the style of various major artists.[23] He stood for election as Mayor of Stuttgart in 1996, receiving 901 votes.[24] Kujau died of cancer in 2000.

In 2006, someone claiming to be his grandniece Petra Kujau was charged with selling "fake forgeries", cheap Asian-made copies of famous paintings with forged signatures of Konrad Kujau.[25] Kujau was portrayed in the 1991 miniseries Selling Hitler by Liverpool-born actor Alexei Sayle. The series also featured Jonathan Pryce as Gerd Heidemann and Tom Baker as Stern executive Manfred Fischer.[26] He was also portrayed in the German film Schtonk! (1991) by Uwe Ochsenknecht.

(Wikipedia)

[irinache]

Piet Mondrian

Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian (/ˈmɔːndriˌɑːn, ˈmɒn-/;[1] Dutch: [ˈpit ˈmɔndrijaːn], later [ˈmɔndrijɑn]; 7 March 1872 – 1 February 1944), was a Dutch painter.

Mondrian was a contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed neoplasticism. This consisted of white ground, upon which he painted a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the three primary colors.[2]

Mondrian's arrival in Paris from the Netherlands in 1911 marked the beginning of a period of profound change. He encountered experiments in Cubism and with the intent of integrating himself within the Parisian avant-garde removed an 'a' from the Dutch spelling of his name (Mondriaan).[3][4]

The Netherlands (1872–1911)

Mondrian was born in Amersfoort in the Netherlands, the second of his parents' children.[5] He was descended from Christian Dirkzoon Monderyan who lived in The Hague as early as 1670.[3] The family moved to Winterswijk in the east of the country when his father, Pieter Cornelius Mondriaan, was appointed Head Teacher at a local primary school.[6]Mondrian was introduced to art from a very early age. His father was a qualified drawing teacher, and, with his uncle, Fritz Mondriaan (a pupil of Willem Maris of the Hague School of artists), the younger Piet often painted and drew along the river Gein.[7]

After a strictly Protestant upbringing, in 1892, Mondrian entered the Academy for Fine Art in Amsterdam.[8] He was already qualified as a teacher.[6] He began his career as a teacher in primary education, but he also practiced painting. Most of his work from this period is naturalistic or Impressionistic, consisting largely of landscapes. These pastoral images of his native country depict windmills, fields, and rivers, initially in the Dutch Impressionist manner of the Hague School and then in a variety of styles and techniques that attest to his search for a personal style. These paintings are most definitely representational, and they illustrate the influence that various artistic movements had on Mondrian, including pointillism and the vivid colors of Fauvism.

Dallas Museum of Art

On display in the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag are a number of paintings from this period, including such Post-Impressionist works as The Red Mill and Trees in Moonrise. Another painting, Evening (Avond) (1908), depicting a tree in a field at dusk, even augurs future developments by using a palette consisting almost entirely of red, yellow, and blue. Although Avond is only limitedly abstract, it is the earliest Mondrian painting to emphasize primary colors.

Museum of Modern Art

, New York

Mondrian's earliest paintings showing a degree of abstraction are a series of canvases from 1905 to 1908 that depict dim scenes of indistinct trees and houses reflected in still water. Although the result leads the viewer to begin focusing on the forms over the content, these paintings are still firmly rooted in nature, and it is only the knowledge of Mondrian's later achievements that leads one to search in these works for the roots of his future abstraction.

Mondrian's art was intimately related to his spiritual and philosophical studies. In 1908, he became interested in the theosophical movement launched by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in the late 19th century, and in 1909 he joined the Dutch branch of the Theosophical Society. The work of Blavatsky and a parallel spiritual movement, Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, significantly affected the further development of his aesthetic.[9] Blavatsky believed that it was possible to attain a more profound knowledge of nature than that provided by empirical means, and much of Mondrian's work for the rest of his life was inspired by his search for that spiritual knowledge. In 1918, he wrote "I got everything from the Secret Doctrine," referring to a book written by Blavatsky. In 1921, in a letter to Steiner, Mondrian argued that his neoplasticism was "the art of the foreseeable future for all true Anthroposophists and Theosophists." He remained a committed Theosophist in subsequent years, although he also believed that his own artistic current, neoplasticism, would eventually become part of a larger, ecumenical spirituality.[10]

Mondrian and his later work were deeply influenced by the 1911 Moderne Kunstkring exhibition of Cubism in Amsterdam. His search for simplification is shown in two versions of Still Life with Ginger Pot (Stilleven met Gemberpot). The 1911 version [11] is Cubist; in the 1912 version[12] the objects are reduced to a round shape with triangles and rectangles.

Paris (1911–1914)

In 1911, Mondrian moved to Paris and changed his name (dropping an 'a' from Mondriaan) to emphasize his departure from the Netherlands, and his integration within the Parisian avant-garde.[4][14] While in Paris, the influence of the Cubist style of Picasso and Georges Braque appeared almost immediately in Mondrian's work. Paintings such as The Sea (1912) and his various studies of trees from that year still contain a measure of representation, but, increasingly, they are dominated by geometric shapes and interlocking planes. While Mondrian was eager to absorb the Cubist influence into his work, it seems clear that he saw Cubism as a "port of call" on his artistic journey, rather than as a destination.

The Netherlands (1914–1919)

Unlike the Cubists, Mondrian still attempted to reconcile his painting with his spiritual pursuits, and in 1913 he began to fuse his art and his theosophical studies into a theory that signaled his final break from representational painting. While Mondrian was visiting home in 1914, World War I began, forcing him to remain in The Netherlands for the duration of the conflict. During this period, he stayed at the Laren artist's colony, where he met Bart van der Leck and Theo van Doesburg, who were both undergoing their own personal journeys toward abstraction. Van der Leck's use of only primary colors in his art greatly influenced Mondrian. After a meeting with Van der Leck in 1916, Mondrian wrote, "My technique which was more or less Cubist, and therefore more or less pictorial, came under the influence of his precise method."[15] With Van Doesburg, Mondrian founded De Stijl (The Style), a journal of the De Stijl Group, in which he first published essays defining his theory, which he called neoplasticism.

Mondrian published "De Nieuwe Beelding in de schilderkunst" ("The New Plastic in Painting")[16] in twelve installments during 1917 and 1918. This was his first major attempt to express his artistic theory in writing. Mondrian's best and most-often quoted expression of this theory, however, comes from a letter he wrote to H. P. Bremmer in 1914:

I construct lines and color combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness. Nature (or, that which I see) inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation (still just an external foundation!) of things…

I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.[17]

Paris (1919–1938)

When the war ended in 1918, Mondrian returned to France where he would remain until 1938. Immersed in the crucible of artistic innovation that was post-war Paris, he flourished in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom that enabled him to embrace an art of pure abstraction for the rest of his life. Mondrian began producing grid-based paintings in late 1919, and in 1920, the style for which he came to be renowned began to appear.

In the early paintings of this style the lines delineating the rectangular forms are relatively thin, and they are gray, not black. The lines also tend to fade as they approach the edge of the painting, rather than stopping abruptly. The forms themselves, smaller and more numerous than in later paintings, are filled with primary colors, black, or gray, and nearly all of them are colored; only a few are left white.

During late 1920 and 1921, Mondrian's paintings arrive at what is to casual observers their definitive and mature form. Thick black lines now separate the forms, which are larger and fewer in number, and more of the forms are left white. This was not the culmination of his artistic evolution, however. Although the refinements became subtler, Mondrian's work continued to evolve during his years in Paris.

In the 1921 paintings, many, though not all, of the black lines stop short at a seemingly arbitrary distance from the edge of the canvas although the divisions between the rectangular forms remain intact. Here, too, the rectangular forms remain mostly colored. As the years passed and Mondrian's work evolved further, he began extending all of the lines to the edges of the canvas, and he began to use fewer and fewer colored forms, favoring white instead.

These tendencies are particularly obvious in the "lozenge" works that Mondrian began producing with regularity in the mid-1920s. The "lozenge" paintings are square canvases tilted 45 degrees, so that they have a diamond shape. Typical of these is Schilderij No. 1: Lozenge With Two Lines and Blue (1926). One of the most minimal of Mondrian's canvases, this painting consists only of two black, perpendicular lines and a small blue triangular form. The lines extend all the way to the edges of the canvas, almost giving the impression that the painting is a fragment of a larger work.

Although one's view of the painting is hampered by the glass protecting it, and by the toll that age and handling have obviously taken on the canvas, a close examination of this painting begins to reveal something of the artist's method. The painting is not composed of perfectly flat planes of color, as one might expect. Subtle brush strokes are evident throughout. The artist appears to have used different techniques for the various elements.[citation needed] The black lines are the flattest elements, with the least amount of depth. The colored forms have the most obvious brush strokes, all running in one direction. Most interesting, however, are the white forms, which clearly have been painted in layers, using brush strokes running in different directions. This generates a greater sense of depth in the white forms so that they appear to overwhelm the lines and the colors, which indeed they were doing, as Mondrian's paintings of this period came to be increasingly dominated by white space.

Schilderij No. 1 may be the most extreme extent of Mondrian's minimalism. As the years progressed, lines began to take precedence over forms in his painting. In the 1930s, he began to use thinner lines and double lines more frequently, punctuated with a few small colored forms, if any at all. Double lines particularly excited Mondrian, for he believed they offered his paintings a new dynamism which he was eager to explore.

In 1934–35 three of Mondrian's paintings were exhibited as part of the "Abstract and Concrete" exhibitions in the UK at Oxford, London, and Liverpool.[18]

London and New York (1938–1944)

In September 1938, Mondrian left Paris in the face of advancing fascism and moved to London.[20] After the Netherlands was invaded and Paris fell in 1940, he left London for Manhattan, where he would remain until his death. Some of Mondrian's later works are difficult to place in terms of his artistic development because there were quite a few canvases that he began in Paris or London and only completed months or years later in Manhattan. The finished works from this later period are visually busy, with more lines than any of his work since the 1920s, placed in an overlapping arrangement that is almost cartographical in appearance. He spent many long hours painting on his own until his hands blistered, and he sometimes cried or made himself sick.

Mondrian produced Lozenge Composition With Four Yellow Lines (1933), a simple painting that innovated thick, colored lines instead of black ones. After that one painting, this practice remained dormant in Mondrian's work until he arrived in Manhattan, at which time he began to embrace it with abandon. In some examples of this new direction, such as Composition (1938) / Place de la Concorde (1943), he appears to have taken unfinished black-line paintings from Paris and completed them in New York by adding short perpendicular lines of different colors, running between the longer black lines, or from a black line to the edge of the canvas. The newly colored areas are thick, almost bridging the gap between lines and forms, and it is startling to see color in a Mondrian painting that is unbounded by black. Other works mix long lines of red amidst the familiar black lines, creating a new sense of depth by the addition of a colored layer on top of the black one. His painting Composition No. 10, 1939–1942, characterized by primary colors, white ground and black grid lines clearly defined Mondrian's radical but classical approach to the rectangle.

On 23 September 1940 Mondrian left Europe for New York aboard the Cunard White Star Lines ship RMS Samaria, departing from Liverpool.[21] The new canvases that Mondrian began in Manhattan are even more startling, and indicate the beginning of a new idiom that was cut short by the artist's death. New York City (1942) is a complex lattice of red, blue, and yellow lines, occasionally interlacing to create a greater sense of depth than his previous works. An unfinished 1941 version of this work uses strips of painted paper tape, which the artist could rearrange at will to experiment with different designs.

Victory Boogie Woogie

(1942–44)

His painting Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942–43) at The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan was highly influential in the school of abstract geometric painting. The piece is made up of a number of shimmering squares of bright color that leap from the canvas, then appear to shimmer, drawing the viewer into those neon lights. In this painting and the unfinished Victory Boogie Woogie (1942–44), Mondrian replaced former solid lines with lines created from small adjoining rectangles of color, created in part by using small pieces of paper tape in various colors. Larger unbounded rectangles of color punctuate the design, some with smaller concentric rectangles inside them. While Mondrian's works of the 1920s and 1930s tend to have an almost scientific austerity about them, these are bright, lively paintings, reflecting the upbeat music that inspired them and the city in which they were made.

In these final works, the forms have indeed usurped the role of the lines, opening another new door for Mondrian's development as an abstractionist. The Boogie-Woogie paintings were clearly more of a revolutionary change than an evolutionary one, representing the most profound development in Mondrian's work since his abandonment of representational art in 1913.

In 2008 the Dutch television program Andere Tijden found the only known movie footage with Mondrian.[22] The discovery of the film footage was announced at the end of a two-year research program on the Victory Boogie Woogie. The research found that the painting was in very good condition and that Mondrian painted the composition in one session. It also was found that the composition was changed radically by Mondrian shortly before his death by using small pieces of colored tape.

Wall works

When the 47-year-old Piet Mondrian left the Netherlands for unfettered Paris for the second and last time in 1919, he set about at once to make his studio a nurturing environment for paintings he had in mind that would increasingly express the principles of Neo-Plasticism about which he had been writing for two years. To hide the studio's structural flaws quickly and inexpensively, he tacked up large rectangular placards, each in a single color or neutral hue. Smaller colored paper squares and rectangles, composed together, accented the walls. Then came an intense period of painting. Then again he addressed the walls, repositioning the colored cutouts, adding to their number, altering the dynamics of color and space, producing new tensions and equilibrium. Before long, he had established a creative schedule in which a period of painting took turns with a period of experimentally regrouping the smaller papers on the walls, a process that directly fed the next period of painting. It was a pattern he followed for the rest of his life, through wartime moves from Paris to London’s Hampstead in 1938 and 1940, across the Atlantic to Manhattan.

At the age of 71 in the fall of 1943, Mondrian moved into his second and final Manhattan studio at 15 East 59th Street, and set about to recreate the environment he had learned over the years was most congenial to his modest way of life and most stimulating to his art. He painted the high walls the same off-white he used on his easel and on the seats, tables and storage cases he designed and fashioned meticulously from discarded orange and apple-crates. He glossed the top of a white metal stool in the same brilliant primary red he applied to the cardboard sheath he made for the radio-phonograph that spilled forth his beloved jazz from well-traveled records. Visitors to this last studio seldom saw more than one or two new canvases, but found, often to their astonishment, that eight large compositions of colored bits of paper he had tacked and re-tacked to the walls in ever-changing relationships constituted together an environment that, paradoxically and simultaneously, was both kinetic and serene, stimulating and restful. It was the best space, Mondrian said, that he had ever inhabited. Tragically, he was there for only a few months, as he died in February 1944.

After his death, Mondrian’s friend and sponsor in Manhattan, artist Harry Holtzman, and another painter friend, Fritz Glarner, carefully documented the studio on film and in still photographs before opening it to the public for a six-week exhibition. Before dismantling the studio, Holtzman (who was also Mondrian’s heir) traced the wall compositions precisely, prepared exact portable facsimiles of the space each had occupied, and affixed to each the original surviving cut-out components. These portable Mondrian compositions have become known as "The Wall Works". Since Mondrian's death, they have been exhibited twice at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art (1983 and 1995–96),[23] once in SoHo at the Carpenter + Hochman Gallery (1984), once each at the Galerie Tokoro in Tokyo, Japan (1993), the XXII Biennial of Sao Paulo (1994), the University of Michigan (1995), and – the first time shown in Europe – at the Akademie der Künste (Academy of The Arts), in Berlin (22 February – 22 April 2007).

Death

Piet Mondrian died of pneumonia on 1 February 1944 and was interred at the Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.[24]

The Mondrian / Holtzman Trust functions as Mondrian's official estate, and "aims to promote awareness of Mondrian's artwork and to ensure the integrity of his work".[26]

References in culture

The National Museum of Serbia was the first museum to include one of Mondrian's paintings in its permanent exhibition.[27]

Along with Klee and Kandinsky, Mondrian was one of the main inspirations to the early pointillist musical aesthetic of serialist composer Pierre Boulez,[28] although his interest in Mondrian was restricted to the works of 1914–15.[29] By May 1949 Boulez said he was "suspicious of Mondrian," and by December 1951 expressed a dislike for his paintings (regarding them as "the most denuded of mystery that have ever been in the world"), and a strong preference for Klee.[30]

In the 1930s, the French fashion designer Lola Prusac, who worked at that time for Hermès in Paris, designed a range of luggage and bags inspired by the latest works of Mondrian: inlays of red, blue, and yellow leather squares.[31]

In 2001–2003 British artist Keith Milow made a series of paintings based on the so-called Transatlantic Paintings (1935–1940) by Mondrian.[32]

In the 1960 film The Apartment (dir by Billy Wilder), Trafalgar Square can be seen to the left and above the television.

Fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent's Fall 1965 Mondrian collection featured shift dresses in blocks of primary color with black bordering, inspired by Mondrian.[33] The collection proved so popular that it inspired a range of imitations that encompassed garments from coats to boots.

In the 1970s the television show The Partridge Family painted a 1957 Chevrolet school bus in Mondrian style.

The La Vie Claire cycling team's bicycles and clothing designs were inspired by Mondrian's work throughout the 1980s. The French ski and bicycle equipment manufacturer LOOK, which also sponsored the team, used a Mondrian-inspired logo for a while. The style was revived in 2008 for a limited edition frame.[34]

1980s R&B sensation Force MDs created a music video for their hit "Love is a House", superimposing themselves performing inside of digitally drawn squares inspired by Composition II.[35]

Piet is an esoteric programming language named after Piet Mondrian in which programs look like abstract art.[36]

Mondrian (programming language) is a programming language named after him.[37]

An episode of the BBC TV drama Hustle entitled "Picture Perfect" is about the team attempting to create and sell a Mondrian forgery. To do so, they must steal a real Mondrian (Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black, 1921) from an art gallery.

The Mondrian is a 20-story high-rise in the Cityplace neighborhood of Oak Lawn, Dallas, Texas (US). Construction started on the structure in 2003 and the building was completed in 2005.

Parc Mondrian is a 17-story apartment building in Singapore completed in 2011, the design of which was said to be inspired by Mondrian's works.[citation needed]

In 2008, Nike released a pair of Dunk Low SB shoes inspired by Mondrian's iconic neo-plastic paintings.[38]

In Julio Cortázar's Rayuela the protagonist is referred as being like Mondrian on several occasions.

The front cover to Australian rock band Silverchair's fifth and final album Young Modern (2007) is a tribute to Piet Mondrian's Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow.

The cover art of American psychedelic pop/indie rock band The Apples in Stereo's second album, Tone Soul Evolution (1997), was inspired by Piet Mondrian.

The character Data in Star Trek the Next Generation has a copy of Tableau 1 in his quarters.

The mathematics book An introduction to sparse stochastic processes[39] by M.Unser and P.Tafti uses a representation of a stochastic process called the Mondrian process for its cover, which is named because of its resemblance with Piet Mondrian artworks.

The Hague City Council honored Mondrian by adorning walls of City Hall with reproductions of his works and describing it as "the largest Mondrian painting in the world."[40] The event celebrated the 100th year of De Stijl movement which Mondrian helped to found.[41]

Commemoration

From 6 June to 5 October 2014, the Tate Liverpool displayed the largest UK collection of Mondrian's works, in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of his death. Mondrian and his Studios included a life-size reconstruction of his Paris studio. Charles Darwent, in The Guardian, wrote: "With its black floor and white walls hung with moveable panels of red, yellow and blue, the studio at Rue du Départ was not just a place for making Mondrians. It was a Mondrian – and a generator of Mondrians."[4] He has been described as "the world’s greatest abstract geometrist".[42]

Partial list of works

Girl Writing/Schrijvend meisje (1892)

At Work / On the Land. Aan den arbeid / Opt land (1898)

Farm building in Het Gooi, Fence and trees in the foreground (1898–1902)

Farm building with bridge (1899)

The Factory (1900)

Willow Grove: Impression of Light and Shadow (c. 1905), oil on canvas, 35 × 45 cm, Dallas Museum of Art

Field with Oak Trees at Dusk (1906)

Field with Young Trees in the Foreground (1907), Cleveland Museum of Art

Farm building with well in daylight (ca.1907)

Molen Mill; Mill in Sunlight (1908) External link.

Avond Evening; Red Tree (1908) External link.

Rij van elf populieren in rood, geel, blauw en groen; Row of eleven poplars in red, yellow, blue and green (1908), Museum de Fundatie [43]

Chrysanthemum (1908) Guggenheim Collection.

Chrysanthemum (ca.1908)

Windmill by the Water (1908)

View from the Dunes with Beach and Piers, Domburg (1909)

Church in Zoutelande (1909)

The Red Tree (1909–10)

Amaryllis (1910)

Summer, Dune in Zeeland (1910) Guggenheim Collection

Spring Sun (Lentezon): Castle Ruin: Brederode (c. late 1909 – early 1910) Dallas Museum of Art, oil on Masonite 62 × 72 cm

Evolution (1910–11)

The Red Mill (1910–11) External link.

Horizontal Tree (1911)

Gray Tree (1911) Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

Still Life with Ginger Pot I (Cubist) (1911) Guggenheim Collection

Still Life with Ginger Pot II (Simplified) (1912) Guggenheim Collection

Apple Tree in Bloom (1912)

Eucaliptus (1912)

Trees (1912–1913)

Scaffoldings (1912–1914)

Composition in Line and Color; Composition No. II (1913)

Oval Composition (Trees) (1913) [1]

Tableau No.2/Composition No. VII (1913) Guggenheim Collection

Compositie XIV (1913)

Church at Damburg/Kerk te Domburg (1914)

Composition 8 (1914) Guggenheim Collection

Ocean 5 (1915) Guggenheim Collection

Composition (1916) Guggenheim Collection

Composition III with Color Planes (1917)

Composition with Color Planes and Gray Lines 1 (1918)

Composition with Gray and Light Brown (1918)

Composition with Grid VII (1919)

Composition Chequerboard, Dark Colors./Compositi (1919)

Composition A: Composition with Black, Red, Gray, Yellow, and Blue (1920)

Composition with Black, Red, Gray, Yellow, and Blue (1920) External link.

DAHLIA (1920)

Tableau I (1921)

Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray (1921)

Composition with Large Blue Plane, Red, Black, Yellow, and Gray (1921)

Composition with Blue, Yellow, Black, and Red (1922)

Composition #2 (1922)

Tableau 2 (1922) Guggenheim Collection

Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, and Grey (1923) Berardo Collection.

Lozenge Composition with Red, Black, Blue, and Yellow (1925)

Lozenge Composition with Red, Gray, Blue, Yellow, and Black (1925) External link.

Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue (1927), Cleveland Museum of Art

Fox Trot; Lozenge Composition with Three Black Lines (1929)

Composition No. III/ Fox Trot B with Black, Red, Blue and Yellow (1929), Yale University Art Gallery

Composition with Yellow Patch (1930)

Composition No. 1: Lozenge with Four Lines (1930) Guggenheim Collection

Composition with Yellow (1930)

Composition with Blue and Yellow (1932)

Composition No. III Blanc-Jaune (1935–42)

Rhythm of Straight Lines (1935–42) Harvard University.

Rhythm of Black Lines painting (1935–42)

Composition blanc, rouge et noir or Composition in White, Black and Red(1936)

Vertical Composition with Blue and White (1936)

Abstraction (1937–42)

Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue (1937–42)

Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red 1938/Composition with Red 1939(1938–1939) Guggenheim Collection

Composition No. 8 (1939–42)

Painting #9 (1939–42)

Composition No. 10 (1939–1942)

New York City I (1942)

Chrysanthemum (1942), Cleveland Museum of Art

Trafalgar Square (1939–1943)

Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942–43) Museum of Modern Art.

Place de la Concorde (1943)

Victory Boogie-Woogie (1943–44) Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.

Composition Bleue et Jeune (1957)

Foxtrott (1967)

[rawchaashayar-blog]

PIONEERS AND HEROES OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN HEBREW ISRAELITE MOVEMENT: 1968-2017 July 03, 2017 "THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE ISRAELITES" By Church Pastor Dr. Franklyn V. Beckles, Jr., (alias/Hebrew name: Elder Azariyah Ben Yosef)

When Israel was a nation, they agreed to a set of covenant laws on Mount Sinai as a special contract with the living GOD (also known as AHAYAH in Hebrew which means “I AM” and his name in Hebrew is YAHUAH/YAHAWAH). It meant that they would be His people and He would be their God or “YAH”. Now with all contracts, which involves two parties, in this case YAH and Israel which had agreements that were spelled out in the contract or covenant. The ancient people of Israel were told that, if they obeyed the laws of the covenant, they would have YAH’s protection and be showered with many blessings, and if they disobeyed they would receive many punishments and curses. Sadly, our ancestors chose to disobey, and following that fateful decision would thrust the Israelites into a series of calamities and troubles (“known as “Jacob’s trouble”), that would carry on throughout history and continue to plague the Black race unto this day! Before long, ancient Israel experienced a Civil War, which eventually split into two Kingdoms with the tribe of Judah leading the other tribes from the south and the rest of the tribes residing in the north. After a period of self-rule, the Assyrians threatened the independence of the Northern Kingdoms. We get that account in the Bible (2 Kings 18:11-12): “And the king of Assyria did carry away Israel into Assyria and put them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes: because they obeyed not the voice of the LORD their God, but transgressed His covenant, and all that Moses the servant of the LORD commanded and would not hear them, nor do them.” This explains why the Northern Kingdoms were first led away into captivity (or slavery), while the Kingdom of Judah, remained alone and vulnerable also did what was evil in the sight of the Most High (The Living GOD). 2 Kings Chapter 24:3 explains “Surely at the commandment of the LORD came upon Judah, to remove them out of His sight, for the sins of Manasseh, according to all that he did;” Because of disobedience, God allowed the Kingdom of Judah and its rich capital, Jerusalem to be conquered by the Babylonians. Seventy long years of captivity was experienced by the ancient Israelites which failed to make them permanently change their wicked ways. Time after time, God would save His people, and they would betray Him, and their own people, causing their captivity to be prolonged until the Persian Empire conquered them. Ezra 1:1: “Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, the LORD God of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth; He hath charged me to build Him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.” That temple was rebuilt and the Hebrews continued to do wickedness in the sight of Yah, our Heavenly Father, the Kingdom of Judah failed to understand the prophecies of His Son Yahushua, like described in: Exodus 12:5, Zechariah 13:6, Genesis 49:10, Isiah 7:14, Micah 5:2, and many other verses in Bible Scripture. Yahushua highlighted many parables prophesying Israel’s betrayal of their Messiah and foretold the many curses that would consume them in the latter days (Matthew 21:33-43). When the Children of Israel were under Roman captivity, and they conspired with the Roman Empire to murder our own Savior. The fate of the Israelites was sealed! Yahushua’s prophecies all came to pass, and because of the rejection of the Prophets of God, the Son of God, and His disciples, the Israelites were forever doomed to inherit the curses outlined in the Book of Deuteronomy and they would continue to be cursed until they sincerely repent and endure until the second coming of our Messiah (Deuteronomy 28:15-68)!!! These prophecies continued throughout history, beginning with the conquest of the Romans, which lasted for hundreds of years, until they eventually lost control to the Arabs (who were Moors), which controlled Jerusalem until the time of the Crusades, in which; White Europeans robbed from all of the Black Civilizations, rewrote mankind’s history to hide the vast accomplishments of Black Empires, and eventually gained ultimate control over the world by reshaping history and reinstituting slavery (which was originally conceived by ancient African Civilizations like Egypt) with the sole purpose of developing racism and targeting the black Hebrews, who escaped Roman persecution in 70 A.D., and fled back into Africa. White Europeans carried on the evil and satanic legacy of the White Greeks and the Roman Empire using Imperialism and brutal conquest to make sure Black people would never rule the world again, and their greatest fears were the mighty heritage of the Israelites! They sought help from Africans (as they did many times before) to assist them in enslaving the Hebrews, particularly from the tribe of Judah. But it didn’t stop there, White Europeans eventually enslaved all the children of the 12 tribes of Israel and scattered them throughout the world. With the ultimate downfall of the Hebrews through slavery, paved the way for White Europeans to steal their identities, their records, their heritage, and their Bible Scriptures and tamper with them. Eventually White Europeans named Kharzars (of the seed of Amalek son of Esau), assumed the identities of the Israelites, and after World War II, with the help from America and its European allies, they formed their own Israeli nation, which was described in the prophecies of the Bible in the Book of Revelation Chapter 2:9 “I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.” Yahushua prophesied that the Gentiles (White people) would trample down Jerusalem, and remain in control of that land until He returns to save His people (us -the true Israelites). The people in the nation of Israel today are not Jews, they are Gentiles! A fact documented by numerous sources, including credible authors like Arthur Koesler in his book “The Thirteenth Tribe”, and Shlomo Sand and his book “The Invention of the Jewish People”. Many so-called Jews themselves admit to stealing the identities of Israelites (especially through online resources like YouTube.com), and admit that the real descendants of the ancient Israelites are the so-called Negros, and according to genetic sciences like DNA research, it has been revealed that Negros are not African at all, they are biologically Semitic Hebrews! Plus, these facts are substantiated in ancient maps, documenting places in Africa, where Europeans could kidnap Africans that belonged to the 12 tribes of Israel and ship them to the Americas and Europe! On the maps downloaded on Google.com, simply type in the words “Negroland Map”, and you can clearly see the name of “Juda” (meaning JUDAH) inscribed in the western part of Africa! Backing up what was documented in the Holy Bible; White people are not from the lineage of Japheth, they are in fact from the lineage of Esau, and “Negros” or “African Americans” are from the lineages of Shem and Jacob (Genesis 25:19-34)! Genesis 25:23-26 states: “The LORD said to her ‘Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples (Black & White) from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other (Blacks), and the other will serve the younger’ (meaning prophecy of what will happen to Whites when Christ returns). When the time came for her to give birth, there were twin boys in her womb. The first to come out was red (Caucasian), and his whole body was like a hairy garment; so they named him Esau (later he was given the name “Edom”). After this, his brother came out, with his hand grasping Esau’s heel; so he was named Jacob (Father of the Israelites). Isaac was sixty years old when Rebekah gave birth to them.” So, what happened to the real people of Judah? Scholars, Historians, Archeologists, Anthropologists, and many credible book authors like Rudolf R. Windsor, Ivan Van Sertima, and Rev. Franklyn V. Beckles, Sr., and many groundbreaking books like “From Babylon to Timbuktu”, substantiate the historical facts which are documented in the Holy Bible, identifying who the true Israelites were and who their descendants are today; as well as, revealing through Bible Scripture that the Israelites are clearly identified by their long history of disobedience to God and His laws and must fit the curses outlined in the Book of Deuteronomy. The only race of people who completely match the curses in Deuteronomy Chapter 28 are the Negros! Many credible and historically documented books back up this important fact, including the legendary book “The Hebrewisms of West Africa”. White Europeans utilized the African Slave Trade initially started by the Arabs, and eventually it became big business and was financed by the Roman Catholic Church. The Transatlantic Slave Trade evolved into a political, religious, and economic campaign to kidnap the true Israelites, and force them into slavery for the purposes of: robbing the homeland, stealing their identities, rewriting history, altering their Hebrew Scriptures (which was preserved in the “Dead Sea” by the Essenes), and using the intelligence of the Hebrew slaves and their strength to build America into the superpower nation that it is today! The Western World – (offspring of the Roman Empire) invented perpetual slavery to demoralize the true nation of Israel and brainwash them by using the sadistic and false teachings of racist bastards like Willie Lynch to alter the destiny of the children of Israel, and create a political system of racism, feminism, corruption, terrorism, genocide, eugenics, and Black on Black prejudice to further humiliate and destroy God’s Chosen people. Today the Elite (also known as the Illuminati) and their paid: college professors, church pastors, entertainers, news media, public school officials, politicians, and community leaders will have you believe that none of these facts are true, or that it doesn’t matter, and continue to promote lies that White “Jews” are the real Israelites, and Negros are Africans or Hamites. In truth, we are Shemites, Israelites, and the Lost Tribes of Israel! The Zondervan Bible Dictionary also backs up this conclusion; stating that the so-called Negros are not Africans, but are the descendants of Shem (one of the three sons of Noah), and Shem is the Patriarch of the Hebrews! We are in fact Hebrews! In Joel 3:6 “The children also of Judah and the children of Jerusalem have ye sold unto the Grecians (White people), that ye might remove them far from their border.” Sadly Psalm 83 is still in effect, our enemies continue to rule over us, women are appointed over the men, Blacks continue to (and will always) stab each other in the back, and they continue to hide our identities from us, they always seek to destroy us, and we destroy our own people through self-hatred and helping our enemies (the Gentiles) remain in power and to systematically murder us through Genocide, Imprisonment (Slavery), and Eugenics. We who know the truth are on our own, in constant danger, risk consistent slander, and must survive this time of Great Tribulation until Christ returns! For now, it’s every man for himself, you cannot trust anyone, especially those of our own people! Unfortunately, we are a race of backstabbers and idolaters (White people always exploit this fact), which is the main reason we fell as a people, succumb to a “slave mentality”, and most will never regain their former glory with God! You must stay encouraged, read your 1611 King James version Holy Bible, teach your children the truth about their true heritage as Hebrews, teach yourself and your family on how to obey the Commandments of God based on Bible Scripture, and never give up seeking God. Let go of the past, repent and sincerely change from all of your wicked ways, receive Christ as our Lord and Savior (John 3:16), be baptized in the Holy Ghost, and continue to persevere, obey all of God’s Commandments, read your Bible and pray to God every day, and be ready to await Yahushua’s return from the heavens to rescue and deliver us, the true people of God, His Chosen seed, and His Remnant from Satan and his unholy kingdoms!

WE ARE THE TRUE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL!

PIONEERS AND HEROES OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN HEBREW ISRAELITE MOVEMENT:

Community Leader Ben Ammi Rev. Franklyn V. Beckles, Sr. Marcus Garvey Malcolm X Yahweh Ben Yahweh Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Elder Azariyah Ben Yosef General Yahanna Steve Cokely Zion Lexx Dr. Franklyn V. Beckles, Jr. Minister Khalid Muhammed and Civil Rights Activist Dick Gregory

THE BLACK MAN IS "GOD", MADE IN HIS IMAGE AND THE MALE FOLLOWERS OF THE MOST HIGH WILL BE THE CHOSEN REMNANT OF THE ELOHIM OF ABRAHAM, ISAAC, & JACOB!!

When The Son of God returns, He will gather all of The Black Men who've been committed to His Father YAH, and THEY will rule the world and impregnate all of the women who will be their wives, sex slaves, servants, and have many children to maintain the Kingdom of The House of ISRAEL!

ONLY THE BLACK MAN WAS MADE IN THE IMAGE OF GOD AND CREATED TO RULE THE WORLD! According to a widespread ancient Near and Far Eastern tradition, as evidenced as FACT and in historical records, God the creator was a black GOD, with a black body. The answers to such questions as: how did this black body develop, of what substance was this body made, and why was this body black, were the focus of the mysteries in these nations. The Creator God of Ancient Israel was this same Black God, and those responsible for forming the Hebrew Bible (old testament) were devotees of this Black God. The Black God of ancient Near Eastern and Biblical/Israelite/Islamic/African traditions was a self-created black man-god, whose physical (though not spiritual) beginnings were from an atom hidden in a primordial darkness. The Hebrew of Genesis I specify that the original black man, in his original state, was "God" on earth.

[caveartfair]

$448 Million Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Sale Led by Bacon and Twombly

Photo courtesy of Christie’s.

Wednesday night’s $448 million Post-War and Contemporary sale at Christie’s New York showed the appetite for fresh-to-market works is stellar, if not voracious.

The results were a notable increase from November’s total of $277 million, thanks to a handful of high-value lots, including four works that together made up more than one third of the total.

Those results suggested something of a comeback at the top end of the market, a segment of the auction market that had declined sharply in 2016 as high-rollers held their cards close to the vest during a tumultuous year. The total value sold of works priced above $10 million fell by more than half last year, according to The Art Market | 2017, a report published recently by Art Basel and UBS, in a year when worldwide auction sales dropped by 26%.

The sale finished with 96% of lots sold, or 68 out of 71, and a 99% rate sold by value. The result without the buyer’s premiums came to $391.3 million, falling within the estimated $339.2 million to $462.8 million range. The vast majority of the works were fresh to market, 85% having not been for sale in at least 20 years, something which tends to stoke demand.

Two lots were withdrawn, including a pricey untitled 1977 painting by Willem de Kooning, which had been estimated for between $25 million and $35 million and a Bruce Nauman sculpture with a $2 million–$3 million estimate. As for the three unsold lots, Loic Gouzer, Christie’s chairman for Post-War & Contemporary Art, blamed President Donald Trump. Given the events of the week, who was in a position to question him? Still, American buyers were a major presence on Wednesday night, winning 55% of the works, and seemingly unfazed by current events and the stock market’s drop on Wednesday.

The evening’s total was lifted by the sale of four headline works, which combined sold for over $167 million. While 82% of the lots fell within or exceeded their estimates, bidding was often subdued, even for featured works such as Sigmar Polke’s Frau mit Butterbrot (1964), which sold for $17 million after less than half a dozen bids (or $15 million at the hammer, right at its estimate), or the sale’s cover lot, Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer (1963).

The Bacon triptych sold for a total $51.7 million, or $46 million before the buyer’s premium. That fell short of the work’s estimate, provided on request, of in excess of $50 million. The portrait was the first painted of Bacon’s lover and muse, who according to (a likely false) legend met the artist while attempting a break-in of his studio. It once belonged to famed children’s books author Roald Dahl before passing to the current consignor.

Cy Twombly’s energetic, large-scale Leda and the Swan (1962), had a slightly better run, climbing from the low $30 millions up to a $47 million hammer price (or $52.8 million with the buyer’s premium). The result, which came safely within its estimate of between $35 million and $55 million, was met with muted applause. Painted during his years in Rome, the painting appeared on sale for the first time in 30 years.

La Hara (1981), Jean-Michel Basquiat’s depiction of a hulking white policeman, with its implicit critique of the “broken windows” theory of policing, felt particularly salient at a time when the country’s attorney general has stated his intention to bring back “tough on crime” policies and empower law enforcement officials around the country. Bidders seemed to agree: The large painting exceeded its estimate of $22 million to $28 million and sold for $34.9 million, or $31 million without the buyer’s premium.

Roy Lichtenstein’s Red and White Brushstrokes (1965) saw limited bidding action, hammering at $25 million, its low estimate. With the premium, the total price came to $28.2 million. The painting is one of 14 works in his “Brushstrokes” series, of which just a few remain in private hands.

Christopher Wool’s Untitled (1988) barely exceeded its low estimate of $15 million, finishing at $15.1 million ($17.1 million with the buyer’s premium) after just a handful of bids. One of his highly recognizable word paintings (it reads “PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE”), it was featured in the 1989 Whitney Biennial and comes from the Spiegel collection.

One of Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell’s Soup can paintings, Big Campbell’s Soup Can with Can Opener (Vegetable) (1962), which the house expected to return in excess of $25 million, sold quickly for $27.5 million with the buyer’s premium, or $26 million without, after just a few bids, climbing in million-dollar increments, from the starting price of $22 million. The only one of this series with a can opener, and the first in the series of 11 at this large scale, it last sold in 2010 for $23.8 million.

Warhol’s Last Supper (1986), by contrast, had a feistier night, running all the way up to $16.5 million ($18.7 million with the buyer’s premium) from a starting bid of $4.5 million, and coming in at nearly three times the low estimate of $6 million.

Twenty-five of the sale’s lots came from the collection of Emily and Jerry Spiegel, New York arts patrons and early supporters of artists like Anselm Kiefer and Louise Bourgeois. The collection, which passed into the hands of the couple’s two daughters, was fought over by Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and smaller rival Phillips. One daughter, Pamela Sanders, chose Christie’s to sell more than 100 of her works, Bloomberg reported. The other daughter, Lise Spiegel Wilks, gave Sotheby’s a prize Basquiat for a guarantee of at least $60 million, according to the Bloomberg report.

Across the Wednesday night sale, 55 lots sold for over $1 million, and 11 of those went for $10 million or above.

Four artists notched new records at auction: David Salle for Footmen (1986), which sold for $583,500; Robert Gober for Untitled (1985) at $5.2 million; Rudolf Stingel for his massive portrait Untitled (After Sam) (2006), at $10.5 million; and Mark Grotjahn for Untitled (S III Released to France Face 43.14) (2011), which went at the high end of its estimate at $16.7 million. Man Ray hit a new record for a gelatin silver print, achieving $2.1 million on an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000 for Portrait of a Tearful Woman (1936).

Younger artists had a fairly strong night. Bidding for Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s I Refuse to be Invisible (2010) sold for $2.2 million at the hammer (or $2.6 million with the buyer’s premium), above its high estimate of $2 million, and Urs Fischer’s sculpture Julian (2014) sold for a within-estimate $3.3 million. However, Sterling Ruby’s SP302 (2014) failed to find a bidder.

Christie’s reported total art sales in 2016 of $5.4 billion, down for the second straight year from 2014’s high of $8.4 billion. The majority, $4.4 billion, came through public auction sales, and the rest through private sales ($935.5 million) and online sales ($67.1 million). Overall sales in the global art market were estimated at slightly under $57 billion in 2016.

Speaking after Wednesday’s sale, Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti said he envisions private sales rising in tandem with auction sales, citing consistent 12% to 15% annual growth in private sales at his house. He said the private sales business often generated more business for the auction side, and vice versa, countering reports that the growth of private sales, where the priciest works could be shopped around more discreetly, as a portion of the major houses’ businesses is cannibalizing their public auctions.

Wednesday’s sale results suggest the Post-War and Contemporary sector will likely continue to dominate the auction market, following some speculation of in recent years of a comeback from the Impressionist and Modern art segment, with collectors using those works that serve as a more stable store of value as a hedge against political and economic uncertainty. Post-war and contemporary art accounted for 52% of the fine art auction market in 2016, according to The Art Market | 2017, up from 32% in 2009 and its highest share on record. The report’s author defines post-war and contemporary artists as those born after 1910.

Despite their growing share of the auction market, post-war and contemporary auction sales dipped alongside the broader market last year too, falling 18% to a total of $5.6 billion and down 28% from the 2014 peak of $7.9 billion.

The major post-war and contemporary evening auctions continue on Thursday with evening sales at Phillips and Sotheby’s. They come after decidedly mixed results in the first half of the week for Impressionist and Modern art. Monday’s Christie’s sale came to $289.1 million with buyer’s premiums included, while Sotheby’s saw its star lot withdrawn on the day of its Tuesday sale, dragging its total down to $173.8 million.

—Anna Louie Sussman

from Artsy News

[avanneman]

A Limo at Risk, Part I: A skeptical view of American education reform, 1983-2017

(Author’s note: In the spring of 1996 I began to work as an editor/writer for a newly created non-profit called the “Education Statistics Services Institute,” whose sole function was to support the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Education. I was assigned work on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a fortunate happenstance, for “NAEP” was to grow substantially in importance, visibility, and funding for all the 19 years I spent working for ESSI and its successor configurations. Working on NAEP was the best employment experience of my life. The work was congenial and the NCES staff were the brightest, most committed people I ever worked with. Readers can decide for themselves if this experience made me “partial” in any way.)

In April 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education, the brainchild of Secretary of Education Terrell Bell, published a report, A Nation At Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, unleashing on an unsuspecting public some of the most stentorian, and some of the most effective, prose in bureaucratic history:

“Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. This report is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility. We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur--others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.

“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.”

You may gather from my title that I disagree with the report. It is worth remarking that the report was released on the cusp of the computer revolution, a revolution that was, to a very great extent, a “Made in America” enterprise, despite the widespread dispersal of technological expertise across the world, and a revolution that will, I believe, reshape the world as the printing press reshaped first Europe and then the world. The makers of this new revolution were, almost uniformly, the froth on that alleged “rising tide of mediocracy” against which Terrell Bell’s minions warned so earnestly. Today, of course, 30 years after these dire warnings, the U.S. economy is easily the strongest in the world, and our higher education system is the envy if not the despair of our competitors.

But enough gloating on my part. Let’s get back to A Nation At Risk and the circumstances of its birth.

If you were covering politics in the U.S. in 1980, as I was, you knew that the Reagan Administration came in with a “roll back” agenda: yeah, they were going to roll back communism, but first they were going to roll back the bureaucracy, right here in the U.S. of A, starting with the heart of the matter, wicked old D.C.

The first order of the bureaucracy-cutting business, according to the Reganaughts, was to concentrate power in the White House. You can’t trust cabinet secretaries to do the job. You just can’t. No matter who he is, as soon as he sits in that great big chair behind that great big desk in that great big office, he’ll go native on you. And that’s precisely what happened to Terrell Bell, Reagan’s first secretary of education—the most hated of all government bureaucracies, in the eyes of the White House, and understandably so, because it was created by the Carter Administration in large part as a favor to the teachers unions.

Yes, Bell went native. In fact, he was already half-native, having been U.S. Commissioner of Education under both Presidents Nixon and Ford in the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare.1 As it turned out, Bell was not the man to undo the new Department. Unlike Don Regan, first Reagan’s Treasury Secretary and then White House chief of staff, he lacked “Fuck you money”. Bell liked his big new office and his big limo and the classy invites—first dibs on virtually every happening thing in DC, not to mention literally thousands of senators, representatives, and other lesser beings anxious to tell you what a great guy you were. Surrounded by all that glittered, Bell turned to his staff and said, essentially, “Give us a reason to exist.” And they did.

You don’t have to spend much time in DC to learn that we are a nation of windows, windows of risk, of opportunity, of vulnerability, windows that are opening and closing with great alacrity, all of them demanding Action! Now! Literally hundreds of reports have been written since 1984, I am sure, written with the same passion and the same surety as A Nation At Risk, yet I am also sure that none of them have had the same impact. It’s worth asking why.

Terrell Bell, born in 1921, was in his early sixties when the report was released. He graduated from high school in 1939, when the high school graduation rate in the U.S. was about 25%, and in his home state of Idaho it was almost surely below that average. The vast majority of Americans were “drop outs”, starting their working lives at age 15, and, often, earlier. There are no data on drop-out rates prior to the late 1950s, because until then dropping out was the norm. It was only in the late 1960s, in conjunction with the maturing of the civil rights movement, that the notion began to emerge that every student ought to graduate from high school, and it was only in the 1970s that this idea became accepted throughout the U.S.2 Shocking as it may sound today—shocking if not inconceivable—high schools were once elite institutions. The high-school diploma, not the college degree, was the hallmark of the middle class.3 Only young adults—those in their mid-thirties and younger—were likely to be familiar with high schools that were not elite institutions. And the Reagan Administration was not a country for young men.

The “innocent” collision of elitist expectations and non-elitist reality had occurred before. The 1950s are recalled today by most conservatives as a halcyon era of high expectations, but such decidedly not the case at the time. One of the most famous educational reform books ever written, Why Johnnie Can’t Read, written in a white heat in 1955 by a man named Rudolf Flesch, denounced the “dumbed down” (my word) texts of the day, claiming (correctly) that the U.S. was the only country in the world that had remedial reading classes but ignoring the fact that the U.S. was also the only country in the world trying to educate 50%, rather than 10%, of its student population (“the upper half of the distribution”, as we say today).4 Flesch’s successors in rage collided with a school system trying to educate the entire distribution, something entirely without precedent in human history.

Terrell Bell had wanted to make his “National Commission” a presidential commission, but Reagan turned him down, not wanting to give the project so much visibility. If Ronald Reagan had been a skilled bureaucratic infighter, he would have said yes and then stacked it with staff that would have turned out a soporific report taking a few pot shots at teachers’ unions, followed by a laundry list of vague “reforms”. But Reagan was not a skilled bureaucratic infighter and by denying Bell’s request he allowed the once-despised Education Department to re-invent itself as the sworn enemy of the NEA rather than its tool.

I would imagine that Bell’s staffers, even the most optimistic, were stunned by their own success. The commission that wrote A Nation at Risk was headed by Milton Goldberg, a career educator who had started out teaching in Philadelphia before transferring first to academia and then to the Education Department itself in 1975. Neither Dr. Goldberg nor the rest of the staff appear to be particularly political. One can only guess that they were educators entirely out of sympathy the strategies developed by “progressive” educators to cope with the burden of educating all of the kids who had once been pushed out of the school system entirely.

Although intensely “educated” and rigorous in tone, the report is entirely unscientific. It’s doubtful that Goldberg had any understanding of the methods needed for the analysis of quantitative data. Instead, the report is nothing more than an exercise in self-righteous cherry-picking. Whatever confirms the pre-chosen thesis is relevant; everything that contradicts it is excluded.

A Nation at Risk makes no reference to the massive changes that had taken place in American education since the civil rights revolution of the sixties, and the consequent expansion of the senior high-school population to include the entire birth cohort (individuals with the same birth year). The report emphasized the decline in SAT scores from 1963 to the early 1980s without remarking that the percentage of students taking the SAT had increased greatly during the same period.5 The report cited declining scores for 17-year-olds on the NAEP science assessment (though NAEP was not mentioned by name), but ignored results from the NAEP reading assessment that showed increased scores for 9- and 13-year-old students.6

Similarly, A Nation At Risk reports “alarming” international comparisons without mentioning that, at the time, the U.S. educational system was much broader and less elitist than the systems of other countries. The report stated that “the South Koreans recently built the world's most efficient steel mill,” as though this were an indictment of U.S. schools rather than U.S. Steel (and the United Steelworkers).

The news that many American students lacked the intellectual proficiency of a Harvard graduate seemed to stun the U.S. media. Largely reared in elite environments themselves, reporters for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, and the “Big Three” networks, which largely set the media agenda back in those far-off times, were “naively egalitarian”, assuming that “since I’m average, everyone ought to be like me”, thinking that they were “average” when compared to their peers, as indeed they were. But they were not “average” when compared to the 50% of the population that was below average, or the 75% percent of the population that was not “above average”. Even more to the point, they are very unlikely to have had much experience interacting with people who actually are “average”, not to mention those well below average.

The 1980s saw the development of the modern “upper middle class”, which shapes so much of American society today. According to the New York Times, in 1967, 7% of American families had an income of $100,000 or more a year (using 2013 dollars). By the mid-eighties, that figure had climbed to 19%. The success of supply-side economics, brought on by the “Reagan Revolution”, gave enormous prestige to the notion of competitiveness, a notion that would embraced by Democrats during the “Clinton Revolution, when liberals learned that they could make as much money as conservatives. Competitiveness became the ethos and fetish of the new, meritocratic upper middle class, competitiveness as an end in itself in every aspect of life. At the same time, for the first time in modern history, the U.S. had lost the overwhelming economic pre-eminence that had been taken for granted for generations. Japan was widely seen as the new colossus, while the U.S. seemed to be falling far, far behind. Endless stories of Japan’s ferociously competitive secondary school system bewitched the chattering classes—ignoring the fact that only a small percentage of Japan’s students engaged in the “four beats five” frenzy.7

In the 20-odd years that I wrote about educational policy, the one thing that truly puzzled me was the almost universal, unthinking acceptance, on both the right and left, of calls for ever-more demanding curricula. Calculus in the eighth grade? Good! Calculus in the sixth grade? Better! Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica for pre-school? Bring it on! Educational “experts” are, obviously, likely to be people who excelled in school and always took advanced courses, but when they are prescribing for the “masses” they forget that they had elite schooling, and in fact often go beyond the courses they actually took and instead plump for the courses they wished they had taken. In attempting to be egalitarian—“if it was good enough for me at Pency Prep it should be good enough for everyone”—they end up being absurd.

The Reagan Revolution was not only concerned with sheer, or mere, economic competitiveness. They also wanted to take control of American education from the New Left, which had wrested it from Cold War liberals, largely on the basis of the Vietnam War. A Nation At Risk helped transform the Department of Education into a weapon in the eighties culture wars, and when Bell left the department in 1985 he was replaced by culture warrior William Bennett, who brought along with him fellow culture warriors Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch.8 Bennett, Finn, and Ravitch seized on NAEP as a device by which to “prove” the inferiority of the American education system.9

NAEP had been designed, in the waning days of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, to be as noncontroversial as possible. Students were tested at the national level only, and by age rather than grade, ensuring that state comparisons would be impossible. Scores were of course anonymous and, in any event, since no student took the entire exam, results were meaningful for student “populations” only and not for individual students.

NAEP was reworked in the late eighties. The “new NAEP” continued to assess student populations only, but added individual state assessments. State participation was voluntary, but most states participated. Under George H. W. Bush, an independent “National Assessment Governing Board” was created to set policy for NAEP. One of the board’s main tasks was to set up “Performance Standards” for each subject and grade—“Basic”, “Proficient”, and “Advanced”—with the goal of bringing performance up to the Proficient level for all students. Allowing for cross-state comparisons and the ability to rate student groups on how well they “should be doing” (using the achievement levels) made NAEP much more “media friendly.” The fact that the great percentage of students scored below the Proficient level in every subject gave the nation’s talking heads new confirmation for their pre-existing conviction that “American schools are lousy.”10

Publication of state results gave Bennett et al. a new stick with which to beat the liberals, because “liberal” states like California, New York, and New Jersey, heavy with black and Hispanic students, were predictably outperformed by “conservative”, all-white states like Kansas and New Hampshire. When sophisticates pointed out that adjusting state scores for the relative socio-economic status (“SES”) and race/ethnicity of the various states’ student populations erased virtually all differences in performance, Bennett and his gang accused them of being racist, despite the fact that these differences in performance, which were substantial, showed almost no variation from one state to another.

However, the state NAEP results were no comfort to the liberals either. Before and during the civil rights revolution of the fifties and sixties it had been perhaps the most deeply held conviction of liberals that the disparities between blacks and whites in the U.S. in income, in drug and alcohol abuse, in illegitimacy, in educational performance, and in any number of other factors, were entirely the product of segregation. In an integrated society, the disparities would disappear. That did not happen. While a large percentage of black Americans did move closer to white, middle-class norms, they did not equal them. At the same time, a smaller, but significant population moved in the other direction. Instead of declining, crime rates for blacks soared, along with the percentage of black children born of unmarried mothers. Furthermore, as blacks began to gain political power in many of the nation’s great cities, one of the first things they did was to implement the notion of government as the employer of last resort—a government job was a job for life. This was already a goal of the public-sector unions, whose membership grew as governments grew in the era of the Great Society, and the teachers’ unions, buoyed by soaring expenditures on education, grew most of all.11

All of these increased expenditures were expected to improve student performance, but that also did not happen. Disparities in educational performance, particularly high school drop-out rates, were considered to be proof of racial prejudice, and many school systems were quite willing to water down content and ignore substandard performance in order to keep black—and later, Hispanic—graduation rates high. Simply expanding the student body to encompass the entire “distribution” would be enough to guarantee a decline in “average” student performance, but efforts to avoid charges of racism had an additional effect. Liberals struggled desperately to solve these problems but often ended up trying to ignore them—for example, refusing to admit that many black educators felt no responsibility towards their students—and were punished over and over again at the polls.

When the Cold War ended, Republicans realized that domestic issues would come to the fore once more. The first President Bush held an elaborate “Education Summit” in 1989, promising to make America “first” in education. When Bill Clinton defeated Bush in 1992, he continued the focus on education. In 1996, he initiated the option of a voluntary “national” test, for reading at grade 4 and mathematics at grade 8, so that parents could compare their child’s learning with the national average. This provoked “social conservatives”—increasingly important in the Republican Party as the Democratic Party continued to “evolve” to the left on social issues12—to a fury, and the Republican Congress, goaded by their base, tore it to pieces.

In a nice illustration of the “law” of unintended consequences, one of the prime beneficiaries of A Nation At Risk was the National Education Association. Buoyed by the rising “Reagan Prosperity”, states responded to the report by throwing money at education. Thanks to the Reagan recovery, states now had more money to spend and they often spent it by hiring more teachers. The number of public school teachers in the U.S. rose from about 2.14 million in 1983 to about 3 million in 2000. Most of these teachers paid dues to the National Education Association (NEA), which replaced its worn headquarters on 16th Street a few blocks north of the White House with a fancy new building, which should probably be called the Terrell Bell Building.

Another nice illustration of the same law came with the election of George W. Bush as president in 2000. Despite conservative rage at Clinton’s national test, Republicans were well aware that most Americans wanted Washington to do “something” about education. In any event, Bush was quite education friendly himself. Once in office, Bush aggressively pushed the “No Child Left Behind Act,” which mandated extensive testing in mathematics and reading of all K-12 students, using state tests, and also effectively required all states to participate in NAEP. Schools whose students failed to meet “adequate yearly progress” towards performance standards to be set individually by each state would be first assisted but then ultimately punished.

NCLB was bitterly opposed, in private, by the teachers’ unions, who had to remain publicly silent, because congressional Democrats believed that the pressure for school accountability was impossible to resist. In addition, many Democrats had come to believe that the teachers’ unions were too often more concerned with teachers than students, and no longer saw them as allies in efforts to improve student performance, particularly among black and Hispanic students. Democrats forced Bush to earn their support by significantly increasing federal funding for education. They also included language in the legislation authorizing even larger expenditures—expenditures that the Bush administration was very unlikely to make—so that, if the expected improvements in student performance did not materialize, they could claim that Republican tight-fistedness was to blame. On the right, many “far right” conservatives sought to weaken the public school system, and thus teachers’ unions, by aggressively supporting school choice and including provisions that would punish schools that failed to show consistent increases in student performance.

Bush himself was not particularly antagonistic towards the teachers unions or the public schools. His own support for school reform, and his own ideas about what should be done, were drawn largely from the “Texas Miracle,” a long-standing educational reform movement in Texas initiated by H. Ross Perot in 1984 and passed during the administration of Democratic Governor Mark White. At that time, Perot was a source of fascination and pride in the Lone Star State, a diminutive man who looked nothing like the stereotypical Texas millionaire, but who was richer—and probably smarter—than any of them. Perot managed to convince the Texas business establishment that the Texas school system, then built very largely around football and 4-H fairs, needed to change. The teachers’ unions in Texas had originally opposed Perot’s reforms, but the eventual success of the program rallied support in Texas for the public schools, allowing the unions to thrive along with the schools in which their members taught.13

Up until September 11, NCLB was one of Bush’s pet projects. Despite the administration’s drastic re-evaluation of its priorities following the tragedies of that day, the NCLB reforms were instituted across the nation. The testing provisions of the act, both at the state and federal level, provided reams of information for everyone interested in education. The requirement for “disaggregation of data”—providing separate averages for a variety of student groups, including race/ethnicity and status as either a student with a disability or an English language learner, allowed non-experts to see the deep disparities in student performance by these categories at the state, district, and school level—disparities that often had gone unobserved in the past.

The NCLB reforms did not lead to the sort of sweeping improvements in education that many on the right had hoped for. However, the new focus on education reform—fed in part by the new information available, and the new awareness of the difficulties involved in producing increased student performance for large populations, help create more sophisticated efforts, perhaps most spectacularly in New York City during the first two terms of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The Obama Administration expanded on the No Child Left Behind Act administratively rather than legislatively. The new administration had ideas very similar to those of the Bush Administration and, like the Bush Administration, regarded the teachers’ unions rather openly as “the enemy”. However justified the administration was in taking this attitude—and I think they were very justified—it significantly weakened Democratic support in Congress for the kinds of reforms the administration had in mind. Republicans, of course, set a price for their support—basically, a raft of explicitly anti-union measures—that no Democratic administration could afford to pay.

In any event, a backlash against No Child Left Behind had set in across the country, focused principally on all the testing, the massive emphasis on reading and mathematics, and the emphasis that school principals placed on those students who were on the edge of making “adequate yearly progress”—a sort of triage that could lead to the neglect of those at the bottom and the top. School administrators and teachers in low-income areas, particularly those with high percentages of black and Hispanic students, felt threatened by the possibility of administrative punishment. Parent of upper-middle-class students felt their children were being neglected. Predictably, the national media ridiculed the “low” performance standards set by many states. The fact that, often, a majority of students could not meet these standards was passed over as irrelevant. Supposedly intelligent, educated adults took it for granted that anything they found “easy” must be easy for a twelve-year-old child as well.

In the first years of the Obama Administration, pushback from educators was muted, in part because the administration, as part of its efforts to counter the Great Recession, was pouring large amounts of money into education, which counterbalanced the tendency of states to reduce funding. But as the economy improved, and the Obama Education Department continued its efforts to pressure the public schools to improve performance, resistance from the teachers’ unions grew.

The great issue of latter part of the Obama Administration was the “Common Core of Education”, effectively designed to set national performance standards in reading and mathematics to be used in all the 50 states, so that states could not “cheat” by setting their NCLB standards “too low”. This reform, aggressively backed by a variety of well-heeled, and well-meaning, upper-income reformer groups like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, became the target of passionate assaults from both the left and right, and the project, an extraordinarily ambitious one, became entangled in the “populist revolt” of the 2016 presidential primary campaign. States that agreed to participate began to back out, although it appears that often the substance of the Common Core standards was retained, covered by an opportune name change. However, the grand scheme, which would have allowed the ranking of every student’s performance across the nation, was wrecked.

Throughout all the sturm und drang of both the Bush and Obama years, student performance as measured by NAEP remained virtually flat. Then, in 2015, the national results for reading and mathematics showed declines from 2013 in both fourth and eighth grade mathematics, and for eighth grade reading, while the average score for fourth grade reading remained unchanged. This alone weakened the momentum for any of the various reform proposals as the second Obama administration drew to a close. The spectacle caused Tom Loveless, the Brookings Institution’s man about education, to sigh in wonder at how and why such a vast expenditure, in money, effort, and expertise at the federal level had failed to move the needle in the direction of higher performance.14 It’s only fair that I should answer Tom.

First of all, the simple fact is that the federal government lacks the muscle to decisively shape K-12 public education in the U.S. The largest pot of federal money for schools, Title I funding for disadvantaged students, amounts to $15 billion a year—money that, supposedly, can be withheld if states don’t comply with federal expectations. But total state and local K-12 expenditures run at about $500 billion a year. Still, states are reluctant to write off Title 1 money, but they rarely have to worry about doing so. They sometimes fear this can happen, but it very rarely does. Senators and representatives get elected to bring money to their states, not to take it away. Mere bureaucrats can get in a great deal of trouble by making the folks back home mad. Furthermore, it is very difficult for any administration to maintain constant pressure on the states to pursue a consistent policy. Education was perhaps the Bush Administration’s top priority, until 9/11, when it suddenly became 19th on a list of 25.

But beyond that are the questions of what parents actually want for their children and, even more shockingly, what children want for themselves. The all but universal position—the all but universal expressed opinion—among both credentialed and self-appointed experts is that parents of course want “the best” for their children—they want them to excel. But, clearly, I don’t believe that this is true. Or, rather, when parents say they want “the best”, they usually don’t mean they want their kids to excel in calculus, to have savored the ironies of The Ambassadors, or to speak fluent Mandarin. They want their kids to be happy, and they want their kids to have fun. Public high schools in comfortable—not opulent, but comfortable—suburbs are likely to have non-educational facilities—football stadiums and basketball courts, swimming pools, “Little Broadway” scale theatres, etc.—that would likely strike visitors from another country as something from another world. What has all this to do with education?

Reformers are, of course, very reluctant to blame parents, and even more reluctant to blame students themselves. Children, after all, are sacred. Well, sacred they be, but that doesn’t mean that they are all potentially obsessive-compulsive overachievers who just need a little prodding. I have read many books on educational reform, and they are all about what children ought to want rather than what they do want. But I do remember one in particular that, on its very last page, violated that rule, and talked about what children, or at least adolescents, do want. Speaking of the research they had done, the authors mentioned that they had visited a wide variety of schools and could find only one common factor. No matter where they went, no matter what the socio-economic makeup the student body, “the most admired members of the student body were the athletes.” One of my sisters offered a slightly different perspective: “High school is the time when shoes are the most important thing in the world.”

Most high school graduates in the U.S. do not go on to college. Most that do go to college go to non-competitive institutions, where, shockingly, they seem to spend almost as much time having “fun” as they did in high school. Yet the educational agenda for the entire student population should, in the eyes of virtually all “reformers” on the left and right, who myopically refuse to look at the people they are talking about, reflect the concerns of the credential-happy few who do seek admission to the same competitive-admission colleges from which the reformers themselves graduated.

From my point of view, the American educational system, for the most part, meets the expectations, and needs, of both parents and student to a far greater extent than any of the reformers, across the board from left to right, are willing to admit, or, in fact, are even capable of understanding. That is why the great conservative proposals for reforming education—charter schools and private school vouchers—that would allow the “magic of the market place” to push student performance upwards can have only limited impact. Most parents have what they want. Their kids attend schools that are safe (this is, in fact, the first priority for parents and the source of all the bizarre “zero tolerance” rules that, for a great many parents, are not bizarre at all) and that are part of their community, schools that serve as the center for their children’s social lives, not schools that require them to memorize and recite Burke’s “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies.”15 And a great many parents who are not happy with their schools still do not want “demanding” schools because they don’t see “credentialism” beyond a simple, unadorned high school diploma as relevant to their children, nor do their children see it.

Does this mean there is no need for reform? Obviously, it doesn’t. There is a significant divide in educational attainment in the U.S., which reflects, of course, the significant divide in American society, the color line. If black and Hispanic students performed nearly as well as white students, there would be very little need for a discussion of education reform in the U.S. But they don’t, and so education reform, principally in terms of erasing these differences, is a necessary topic of discussion.

This potted history of mine probably sounds so jaundiced as to suggest that I don’t believe significant education reform is possible, even though necessary. That’s not true, though I am tempted to say that it takes a billionaire, for the two most dramatic, large-scale examples of successful education reform that I can think of are Texas and H. Ross Perot and Michael Bloomberg in New York City. In Part II of this discussion, I’ll review these reform efforts and give some skeptical though I hope not despairing suggestions for further reform.

Why Regan’s men didn’t look further afield than Bell is a bit of a mystery. Bell was originally from Utah, and he was backed by several men close to Reagan, including Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch. Bell was not a wealthy man. He moved back to Utah after Ford’s defeat, and, when he got the new job under Reagan, drove back to DC cross-country in a U-Haul packed with his belongings. I guess he liked the big city. ↩︎

In the deep south states like Mississippi and Alabama, the high school completion rate for black students was effectively zero, by design, and the rate for white students was not much better (by design as well). A relative handful of large land owners controlled fiscal policy at the state and local level. They educated their children privately, and deliberately starved public education. In the cities, a small, white middle class supported a handful of “good”, segregated schools for the benefit of their children. In parts of the North and Midwest, of course, public education was much more strongly supported. ↩︎

I can remember a country-music song—supposedly, a mother addressing her son—that speaks of “that all-important high school diploma” in complete earnest. By the late sixties, of course, Woody Allen and Lily Tomlin were teaching “us” to laugh at high school graduates. We were cool! We’d been to college! ↩︎

Flesch, born in 1911 (the same year as Ronald Reagan) was a product of the intensely elitist Austrian education system. If more than 10% of Austrian 18-year-olds graduated from any form of high school in 1929, I’d be surprised. And Flesch, who had a doctorate in law from Vienna University, was almost surely the product of the super-elite “Gymnasium” high school program, one of the most demanding in the world. ↩︎

According to Wikipedia, demographic changes in the student population taking the SAT only explain about 40% of the decline in scores, citing Stedman, Lawrence; Kaestle, Carl (1991). "The Great Test Score Decline: A Closer Look". In Kaestle, Carl. Literacy in the United States. Yale University Press. p. 132. ↩︎

The current NAEP science assessment is not the same assessment as the one cited in A Nation At Risk. The current NAEP reading assessment is also “new”, but results from the original reading assessment are part of the NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment. ↩︎

“Four beats five” meant that a student should only sleep four hours a night when cramming for the college entrance exams, around which the entire elite secondary school program revolved. A few observers noticed that once Japanese students got in to college, they spent all their time recovering from the ordeal of entrance, and learned little. ↩︎

Bennett’s appointment was a victory for the “neocons” in the Right’s own culture war. Bennett rose to prominence early in the Reagan Administration when Reagan appointed him head of the National Endowment for the Humanities over paleocon/neo-Confederate Mel Bradford, a favorite of John C. Calhoun-lovin’ Russell Kirk. ↩︎

I did not begin working under contract for NAEP until the Clinton Administration (1996), by which time Bennett, Finn, and Ravitch had of course all left. About the time I arrived, Ravitch had published, in the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s magazine The American Scholar, an article on her experiences at Education titled “A Scholar Comes to Washington”, implying that, prior to Dr. Ravitch’s arrival, there were no scholars in Washington. I found this particularly funny because the editorial offices of The American Scholar were then located less than a block from my condo, near the intersection of Q Street and New Hampshire Avenue, NW. ↩︎

I have never seen anyone in the supposedly skeptical media wonder if the performance standards were not in fact too high. The NAEP governing board, commenting on the 2015 mathematics and reading assessments says that, based on the results, “an estimated 37 percent of 12th-graders are prepared for college-level coursework in each subject.” However, while 37% of students were at the Proficient level for reading, only 27% reached that level for mathematics. To expect that even the lowest-performing students should be “college ready” in reading and more than “college ready” in mathematics is certainly to expect too much. ↩︎

Back in the eighties I read a study of Chicago’s public schools. Teachers were guaranteed 10 days of sick leave for a “year” of 180 days. The average teacher called in sick 11 days a year. Steven Brill’s famous 2009 article on New York City’s infamous, unfirable “rubber room” teachers is here. By 2011, the rubber room was empty. ↩︎

Bill Clinton, promising to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare”, carried much of the “upper South” in 1992. Immediately after taking office, he sought to bring homosexuals into the military. This is not what the Southern Baptists who voted for him had in mind. ↩︎

The teachers were particularly, and naturally, offended by a teacher competency test, which of course did not set a high bar, although many teachers initially could not meet it. Coaches were infuriated by the notorious “no pass, no play” rule for student athletes, which was ultimately upheld by the Texas Supreme Court. The political background for what became known as the “Texas Miracle” is told online by Bill Hobby, former lieutenant governor under Mark White. ↩︎

I failed to copy the link, but I doubt if Tom will say that he was misquoted. The link I gave will take you to his page at Brookings, where you can download a series of annual reports on education that he supervises. A comprehensive study of the Obama Administration's efforts, School Improvement Grants: Implementation and Effectiveness showed few if any positive results. ↩︎

One of my aunts did this to guarantee herself an A in American History. ↩︎