“Following Dehmel’s advice, for which I am thankful to this day, I used my time in translating from foreign languages, and even now I hold this to be the best way for a young poet to understand more deeply and more creatively the spirit of his own language. I translated the verses of Baudelaire, a few of Verlaine, Keats, William Norris, a short drama by Charles van Lerberghe, a novel by Camille Lemonnier, pour me faire la main.
“Just because every strange language at first offers opposition in its most personal turnings to those who would copy it, it invites forces of expression which, otherwise unsought, would never come to light; and this struggle to wrest from a strange language its most intimate essence and to mold it as plastically into one’s own language, was always a particular artistic desire on my part. Because this silent and actually thankless work requires patience and perseverance, virtues which I had neglected in the Gymnasium, through ease and boldness, it became particularly dear to me; for in this humble activity of transmitting the highest treasures of art I experienced for the first time the assurance of doing something truly useful, a justification of my existence.”
For a time the Catholic Church was reluctant to approve Bible translations; now they are encouraged. What happened?
This post is for students, people caught up in arguments about history and religion, and anyone else who’s ever wondered about this issue. I hope it’s a useful introduction to the topic. If you find part of this post confusing, or if it doesn’t answer a question you would expect it to answer, leave a comment and I might make changes in response.
PART ONE: Practical Considerations
When people ask this question, they’re thinking about the mauve part of this map, where the head of the Church was the Bishop of Rome and the authorized version of the Bible was the Vulgate, a Latin translation of the Bible from Greek and Hebrew, written by St. Jerome in the late fourth century.
The first thing you need to understand to get a handle on the issue is how the linguistic landscape of Europe made Latin the favored language of education.
As Walter J. Ong explains in his excellent book Orality and Literacy, “Between about AD 550 and 700 the Latin spoken as a vernacular in various parts of Europe had evolved into various early forms of Italian, Spanish, Catalan, French, and the other Romance languages. By AD 700, speakers of these offshoots of Latin could no longer understand the old written Latin, intelligible perhaps to some of their great-grandparents. Their spoken language had moved too far away from its origins.
“But schooling, and with it most official discourse of Church or state, continued in Latin. There was really no alternative. Europe was a morass of hundreds of languages and dialects, most of them never written to this day. Tribes speaking countless Germanic and Slavic dialects, and even more exotic, non-Indo-European languages such as Magyar and Finnish and Turkish, were moving into western Europe. There was no way to translate the works, literary, scientific, philosophical, medical or theological, taught in school and universities, into the swarming oral vernaculars which often had different, mutually unintelligible forms among populations perhaps only fifty miles apart. Until one or another dialect for economic or other reasons became dominant enough to gain adherents even from other dialectical regions (as the East Midland dialect did in England or Hochdeutsch in Germany), the only practical policy was to teach Latin to the limited numbers of boys going to school.” (p. 112)
In other words, for much of the middle ages, if you wanted to translate the Bible into the vernacular, the first question was: Which vernacular? If you were in the German-speaking world, the answer couldn’t just be “German,” because there was no single standard form of German. Depending on where you lived, you might call the supreme being “God,” “Got,” or “Kot”. If you wanted to write “I believe in God the Father almighty,” your location would determine whether you wrote “Ih gilaubu in got fater almahtigan,” or “Gilouiu an god fader alomahtigan,” or “Ec gelobo in got alamehtigan fadaer”. Whatever you wrote, its geographical reach would be quite limited.
The vernacular also changes over time, whereas Latin—while not entirely immune to modification—is immensely more consistent as generations go by than the language people are shouting at each other in the streets.
Bear in mind, as well, that books required an enormous amount of time and effort to produce. Someone had to sit in a chilly scriptorium scratching away at parchment or vellum (itself laboriously produced from animal skins) with a quill, which had limited mobility and needed to be dipped in liquid ink repeatedly. Here is a good video about how books were made in the middle ages. In short: it took a while.
And then the translation process itself takes time. Consider how long it takes to think through the best way to translate each line of the Bible. That’s still the case today, but it’s even harder when you’re translating into a language that doesn’t yet have a large body of prose writing that could inform your style and usage.
In the time it might take you to produce a single vernacular Bible of limited utility, you could teach Latin to a room full of young lads who could then use it to read not just the Bible, but other important books as well. What’s more, since schools all over Europe were teaching Latin, your local boys could go on to communicate easily with scholars in other countries. All that had to be done to make key works accessible to people in different times and places, and enable them to share their own works widely, was to teach them Latin. For a long time, this was the most efficient system available.
It worked so well for so long that when vernaculars began to coalesce into standardized forms and other systems became possible, people were not necessarily in a hurry to change it.
PART TWO: The Problem of Translation
There is no perfect translation and every translation is also an interpretation. This is unavoidable.
A legend is told about the Septuagint, which is an ancient translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. The story goes that 72 translators gathered in Alexandria. Each of them worked in isolation on his own version of the text and when they had finished and compared their work, behold, it was found that everyone had written the same words.
That would indeed be a miracle.
The translation of authoritative religious texts is always a cause for concern. The legend of the Septuagint soothed the anxiety of those who relied on it. Vulgate readers could take comfort from Jerome’s status as a saint—one could assume the Holy Spirit was guiding his pen. But the guardians of orthodoxy were not eager to see his translation turned into hundreds of new, experimental translations.
The problem of translation is a problem for everyone, not just medieval Europeans. For example, the customary way to deal with this problem in Islam is for only the Arabic text of the Koran to be truly considered “The Koran”; early translations had titles like The Meaning of the Glorious Koran or An Interpretation of the Koran. I have a copy entitled The Holy Qur’an with English Translation. It contains the Arabic text, and only that part is actually the Holy Qur’an.
Having just checked Amazon, I’m not sure how strict publishers are anymore about the titles they put on translations of the Koran. But I did find interesting comments (on three different versions) that reflect common concerns about the translation of holy books:
It’s a non-sectarian translation. It’s neither Sunni nor Shia. It just translates the Quran. No interpretations and explanations. [mmm-hmmm – Ed.]
I give it four stars only because it was clear to me in reading it that the anonymous translator ensured that sometimes difficult and controversial passages received the kindest, most Islam-supportive interpretations.
I suspect Arberry’s translation of the Holy Koran is not without flaws….again, this is a translation, not the Koran itself as God’s word. For this reason, I assigned 4 stars to the translation, but a perfect score to the Holy Word of God as written in the Koran.
To return to the Bible, it’s important to understand that Catholic theologians of the Vulgate era were leaning hard on the Latin text to support Church teaching. What if the text became unmoored by translation into multiple languages, passing through the interpretive faculties of many people, some of them, perhaps, devious heretics? What might come out on the other end and what problems might it cause? There were concerns.
But here I should say a bit about the translations that were in fact made in the centuries before the Reformation, despite all the above-mentioned reasons not to bother translating the Bible.
PART THREE: Pre-Reformation Bible Translations
You may have finished part one and thought, “That’s fine for the few boys who went to school, but what about everyone else? How did they find out what was in the Bible?”
That’s a big topic, but concisely: sermons, other preaching, storytelling, images, mystery plays, popular devotions, and sometimes, early translations.
As explained in part one, vernacular translations of the entire Bible were doomed to fail a cost/benefit analysis. But there were various translations of important parts of the Bible into local languages.
The Wessex Gospels are a well-known example of a translation into Old English, done in the late tenth century (ca 990).
Here is a sampling of German translations:
a ninth-century translation of a Latin translation of the Diatessaron of Tatian into east Franconian, seen here in a modern edition:
a psalm translation, also from the ninth century, into Alemannic. I put this one next to a modern English translation:
Ps. 114 (116) Ih minnota, pidiu kehorta truhtin stimma des kebetes mines. Danta kineicta ora sinaz mir, inti in tagon minen kinemmu dih. Umbiseliton mih seher des todes, zaala dera hella funtun mih. Arabeit inti seher fand, inti namon truhtines kinamta. Uuolago truhtin, erlosi sela mina. kenadiger truhtin inti recter, inti got unser kenadit. Kehaltanti luzcila truhtin: kediomuoter pim inti arlosta mih. Uuerbi, sela mina, in resti dina, danta truhtin uuolateta dir. Danta erlosta sela mina fona tode, ougon miniu fona zaharim, fuozzi mine fona slippe.
I love the Lord, for he heard my voice; he heard my cry for mercy. Because he turned his ear to me, I will call on him as long as I live. The cords of death entangled me, the anguish of the grave came over me; I was overcome by distress and sorrow. Then I called on the name of the Lord: “Lord, save me!” The Lord is gracious and righteous; our God is full of compassion. The Lord protects the unwary; when I was brought low, he saved me. Return to your rest, my soul, for the Lord has been good to you. For you, Lord, have delivered me from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling.
a translation of the Gospel of Matthew into old Bavarian in the early ninth century, now included in the “Mondseer Fragmente.” It is the earliest translation of part of the Bible into a dialect of Old High German. Here’s a photo of the original manuscript:
There were also loose translations, such as poetic retellings of Bible stories. The best-known is Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch, written, once again, in the ninth century. You can read the whole thing, and even click on each word for more info, here. It’s a charming work with poetic details. Of the angel Gabriel, Oftrid says, “Tho quam boto fona gote, engil ir himile. / braht er therera uuorolti diuri arunti. / Fluog er sunnun pad, sterrono straza, / uuega uuolkono zi deru itis frono.” (There came a messenger from God, an angel from heaven. / He brought the world good news. / He flew the sun’s path, the street of stars, / the way of clouds, to the holy woman.)
Interlinear glosses were another way of translating the Bible. A “gloss” can mean commentary in the margins of a text, but in this case it means a simple, word-for-word translation written in between the lines. These were especially for people who could read but didn’t have excellent Latin skills, such as nuns, well-to-do laypeople, and poorly educated priests. They helped people understand the text of the Bible, but did not constitute good translations on their own, rather like the song translations I discussed in my post “When bad translations are good.”
PART FOUR: The Crackdown
Bible translations were never completely forbidden, but by the late Middle Ages, they had become fraught and risky projects. As the tumultuous world of the ninth and tenth centuries gave way to a more settled world where no one had pagan grandparents, the Vikings weren’t coming and the Saracens were pretty quiet, and the Latin education system was exploding into a giant systematic-theology debate-fest, the spirit of evangelization gave way to the spirit of bickering about what the Bible really means.
The Mediterranean world in late antiquity had seen a long dance of heresies and councils, but western Europe was relatively placid in terms of heresy in the early Middle Ages. Until King Robert the Pious of France ordered the burning of alleged heretics in Orleans in 1022, no one had been put to death for heresy in the western Church since 383.
The controversies of the High-to-Late Middle Ages awakened the concerns mentioned at the end of Part Two: Who is doing these translations? Are they heretics? ARE THEY???
Medieval heresy and its impact on scripture is such a vast topic that I can’t provide anything like a comprehensive account. Instead, I’ll provide a snapshot of how these issues played out in one case. Here’s what happened when the Bishop of Metz got in touch with Pope Innocent III about a group of Waldensians in his diocese, as recounted in Medieval Heresy by Malcolm Lambert:
“Their [the Waldensians’] knowledge of the Bible was often remarkable. Children began to learn the gospels and the epistles. It was not unknown for an illiterate supporter to know forty Sunday gospels by heart, and in Austria in the thirteenth century a relatively objective Catholic observer recorded the case of a member who knew all the book of Job by heart.
“Attitudes of churchmen towards vernacular translations (in so far as they were to be used by the common people) tended to be hostile partly because of the use made of them in practice by heretical preachers. When the bishop of Metz wrote to Innocent III in 1199 denouncing laymen and women who had commissioned vernacular translations of Scripture and relied on them for debating about their contents in secret gatherings and for preaching, the pope was slow to authorize repression.
“His chief concern lay with the unauthorized preaching. He asked the bishop to find out about the author of the translation, his intention and the quality of faith of those who used it—and about their attitude to the papacy and the Church. His reply to the bishop’s renewed complaint that some of them had been disobedient to Innocent’s requirements, alleging that they owed obedience only to God, was to commission three Cistercian abbots to go to Metz to investigate further and correct the laity where necessary. It is not known what happened, though a later Cistercian chronicle speaks of abbots burning translations in Metz. It was a likely outcome.
“Clearly Innocent was suspicious of an over-hasty bishop and anxious not to extinguish enthusiasm. He said that the ‘desire for understanding the Holy Scriptures and a zeal for preaching what is in the Scriptures is something not to be reprimanded but rather to be encouraged’, and it is significant that at the end of his pontificate, when he drew up constitutions for the fourth Lateran Council of 1215, he did not include in them any blanket prohibition of translations of Scripture. Nevertheless he also explained that ‘the secret mysteries of the faith ought not…to be explained to all men in all places…For such is the depth of divine Scripture, that not only the simple and illiterate but even the prudent and learned are not fully sufficient to try to understand it.’ Here lay the nub of the matter. The study of Scripture demanded training and skill; the use of it formed a part of the Church’s teaching and could not be divorced from it. If the use of translations came to be associated with teaching hostile to, or contemptuous of the priesthood, as was the case in Metz, then the translations were likely to be casualties. Repression of translations as well as of heretical preachers was the simple disciplinary solution, especially when local prelates had narrow horizons.” [- Lambert, Medieval Heresy, third edition, pp. 81-82]
Here Lambert gives us a good sense of the many factors involved in the Catholic hierarchy’s growing hostility to vernacular Bibles during the period. However, they couldn’t keep that cat in the bag forever.
PART FIVE: The Cat gets out of the Bag
By the early 1500s, the state of vernacular languages in western Europe and the advances in printing technology made Bible translations for popular consumption inevitable. It was around 1500 that a supraregional German “Schriftsprache” (written language) emerged, and it lay there waiting for someone to pick it up, put it in the Bible, and put that Bible on the presses. That someone was, of course, Martin Luther, who escaped the stake thanks to powerful friends who protected and promoted his translation of the Bible into German (New Testament 1522, entire Bible 1534). Luther’s open letter on translation deserves its own post. Perhaps I’ll do that next.
For now, I’ll briefly cover a few more factors that contributed to the liberalization of Bible translation, because goodness, this post is getting long.
Renaissance Humanists and their emphasis on original sources (“Ad fontes!”) drove progress in Biblical research. Important projects of the Reformation era included Erasmus’ Latin-and-Greek edition of the New Testament (first edition in 1516), and the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, a massive undertaking by scholars in Spain that began in 1502 and was completed around the time Luther wrote his 95 theses. This video is an ad for a facsimile of it; it’s worth watching for a thorough tour of its contents.
One result of that new scholarship was that it became harder to convince everyone to just chill and be content with the Vulgate—in part because people were gaining new insights from studying Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, but also because their studies revealed errors in the Vulgate. For example, when Moses came back from talking with God, he had to wear a veil because his face was so luminous. But for some reason St. Jerome translated that passage as saying that Moses had horns. I mean I get it, Jerome, I’ve made mistakes too, but at least I didn’t make Michelangelo do this:
Between the exciting state of scholarship, German princes feeling fed up with Rome, and the magic of the printing press, it became impossible for the hierarchy to control and limit Bible translation and use as they had been wont to do.
The only option left was for Catholics to get in on the act and make their own vernacular translations for popular use. In Germany, Dominican friar Johann Dietenberger published a German Bible (Biblia beider Allt und Newen Testamenten, new verdeutscht) in 1534.
And to cut a long story short, that’s how you eventually get to the array of Bible translations, Protestant, Catholic, “Amplified,” Non-denominational, scholarly, popular, groovy or otherwise that you can now purchase wherever books are sold.
No, not unless you decide translation is impossible and every language is actually untranslatable.
But William Shirer mentions in his Berlin Diary that one Major Atkinson of the BBC did an English translation of Spengler’s Decline of the West that was “even better than the original — one of the few great translations from the German, an almost untranslatable language.”
What on earth would make German more untranslatable than any other language? Shirer doesn’t specify.
However, he does seem to have trouble with it himself. At one point in the book, he translates “Größenwahn” as “arch-madness” when it’s actually “megalomania.” And since I’m lucky enough to own a German-English dictionary printed in 1936, I double-checked and found “megalomania” there as well. Mr. Shirer probably mistook the noun “Größe” for the adjective “groß” and concluded the word meant a madness that is itself large, rather than a madness focused on enlargement.
So maybe “German is almost untranslatable” actually means “translating German is hard for me.”
Anyway, I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on him; after all, he had to spend years in Nazi Germany when he could have been assigned to some country with sunnier weather and less totalitarianism. He was probably just peeved. Which would explain entries like this:
“Struck by the ugliness of the German women on the streets and in restaurants and cafés. As a race they are certainly the least attractive in Europe. They have no ankles. They walk badly. They dress worse than English women used to. Off to Danzig tonight.”
The flooding in Germany this summer reminded me of this letter I translated a few years ago, and the client gave me permission to share it.
Spork is in Nordrhein-Westfalen, right by the border with the Netherlands. Josef was a family member who had left Spork to settle in Wisconsin.
The flood is described in paragraph 5. Apart from that, there’s news about the Franco-Prussian war, family news, and village gossip. I’ve done a little light editing.
Spork, January 11, 1871
Dear Josef,
First of all, we wish you a happy new year. May the good Lord lend you his aid so that everything goes well for you in the New World and is as you would wish. Your lovely letter arrived in good condition on December 15, 1870. We were all very happy to learn that you had made it through the dangerous voyage and arrived in America. Over here, people had been saying that the ship you were on had sunk. In the future, do write to us about how you and your friends are doing. We are having a very hard winter here, for three weeks in a row it’s been 10, 12, or even 15 degrees below zero every day. We just had a few days of thaw and now it’s freezing again.
Thank the Lord that you’re not here, for the war with France has taken on a character more serious than anyone expected. All men from 18 to 40 who are fit to bear arms are being drafted indiscriminately. Our troops are now at Paris. The strongest fortresses in France, including Metz and Strassbourg, were stormed by our soldiers and have surrendered. Now you can imagine what our boys have had to go through at Paris. The terrible cold and spending the day without shelter. You know all about that. For the bombardment of Paris, our troops have gathered around the city with a force of eight hundred fifty thousand men. The bombardment began on December 23rd, 1870. They are using over 600 of the heaviest cannons, including twelve Riesenmörfer where each shot weighs over two hundred pounds. Our soldiers have now taken all the fortresses around Paris; the city itself has been hit in several places by our grenades and caught fire and if it does not surrender it will probably end up a pile of ash. We can only look upon it all with regret, but the Prussians alone now have over sixty thousand casualties, not counting the sick and wounded, and the French many more. Prussia has four hundred thousand French prisoners of war. The war has simply become a never-ending slaughter. How long it will last cannot be predicted, but it is certain that many, many more victims will fall.
Now we would like to tell you about our household situation and how we are doing. We are, praise God, all in good health. Although our household entails much work and trouble, it consists primarily of our family – Father, who is still quite well, then Dora my wife, myself, my two children who are very healthy and Johann is with us. Sickly little Johann is gaining weight in defiance of all expectations and has already learned to walk. Other members of our household are Johanna, your Dora her sister, Johann Hermes from Süderwick. Stelke who makes wooden shoes is staying with us again and we are giving him plenty of help. Holzendorf has done so much to disadvantage Stelke that the latter did not receive his license. I even had to go to the Comptroller to help Stelke but it will probably be over with Holzendorf soon because all the bad things he has done are coming before the public prosecutor, including the fight at the riflery festival.
Now for the neighbors. Recently old Kniepert sprained his leg so badly while unloading coal that he was bed-ridden for a time. At the same time, at half past three in the morning in the Schopperts’ house, old Wilting was talking to his wife who was quite well. Immediately afterwards he tried to wake her up but could no longer do so, because she had suddenly gone to her eternal rest and was a corpse. You can imagine the grief and pain. The old man is in bed. But that family suffers from terrible misfortune. First his son drowned in the Rhine, now this. Johann Radstaak is home again but how? He’s using crutches. He was shot in the lower leg at the battle of Wörth. The bullet went through the thick flesh from behind and out through the shin bone at the front. It’s uncertain how many invalids will get pensions.
We also have to tell you that for three weeks it rained so much here that the oldest people could not remember the water ever being so high. Near Bocholt at the Holy Image, the water overflowed onto the street and poured into the factory, causing about three thousand Thaler worth of damage. Where we are, almost everything practically turned into a lake. It was hard even to make it to a neighbor’s house. The cellars were all full of water and the big frost happened right afterwards.
Dear Josef, now we would like to ask you to tell us more details about your journey, especially the sea voyage, because we are very curious about that. We think that of all the mortal dangers you have been through, that must be the biggest and will have made both of you unwilling to undertake such a journey again. However, if possible, we would be happy to see you two again sometime. Johanna wants to tell you something else, dear Josef. I will put down her own words here: I thank you very much for the friendly greeting you sent to me in your fine letter. Please send me such greetings again. Stelke wishes you lots of luck and prosperity and notes that not a hair falls from our heads unless God wills it so. In his infinite wisdom, he arranged your journey over the ocean so that you did not travel on the ship that sank, and in his opinion that is a sign that things will go well for you both.
In conclusion, dear Josef, we send you a thousand greetings over the sea and express our most heartfelt wishes for your prosperity. Greetings especially from Stelke, Hermes, and Hermann Hüning who is also here and is an avid hunter. All of us also send greetings to your friends and ours and ask them to write to us sometime as well.
Respectful greetings from your Father in particular, and your brothers and all your relatives and neighbors.
While helping my mom clean out her basement, I found this 1976 newspaper clipping about the notorious SS officer Otto Skorzeny, who apparently used to boast that he would be willing and able to spring Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, and Baldur von Schirach out of Spandau prison for a tidy sum.
The columnist, Don Lewis, consulted my father, James Spires (1933-2012), about this issue because he had been a guard at Spandau with the US Army in the late 1950s. The entire column appears below as a jpeg, but in case it’s hard for anyone to enlarge and read, I’ve typed out my Dad’s impressively detailed tips for how to break into the prison. Given that the place has been demolished and the Nazi war criminals in question are dead, it seems safe to put this out there:
Col. Spires said he believes that if Skorzeny decided to come out of retirement and attack Spandau, the aging pirate would have found the prison “a pretty tough nut to crack.”
Spires said while rescuers could have flown a helicopter into the courtyard, the open space was small and dominated by soldiers in the four guard towers at each corner of the compound.
“Even if they did get one in, with a small courtyard like this, they would have had to have some way of knocking out all these towers because the guards all had a clear shot,” Spires recalled. “They could have shot the prisoners,” he said. “They could have shot the helicopter up. So it would have been tough to get out.”
“To get them out of the prison itself, the logical way to attack it would have been to go into the civilian housing around the prison and set up snipers there. Then, on a prearranged signal, which would probably be geared to the movement of a roving two-man patrol outside on the perimeter of the electrified fence – when these guys got to where they could be hit from these houses, you would attack the gate with 12 to 15 men.”
Col. Spires said the attackers, using some sort of explosive device, would blow up the main gate – a heavy oak barrier reinforced with iron bands – kill the guard at the peephole, the officer of the guard and the warden.
“Then you could get into the cellblocks and possibly get these guys out,” Col. Spires said. “In the meantime, you’d have to keep the tower guards pinned down by fire. But you would only have a maximum of five minutes before other soldiers arrived on the scene from our guardhouse. And then, in another 10 minutes or so, you’d have had people coming from the British barracks a block and a half away. So it would have been a split second operation. It would have been very difficult.”
So there you go: a “very difficult” job and quite bloody. Good thing no one ever tried it, or I might not be here.
Vienna has once again been ranked the world’s best city to live in. Apparently it’s won the Mercer Quality of Living Survey 10 years in a row and from what I saw on my last visit there, I’d say the honor is well-deserved.
But Vienna hasn’t always been such a great place to live. In
the good old days it was probably the best place to develop your mad composition
skills, eat delicious pastries, and get syphilis, but the actual living part
was a challenge.
Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Vienna suffered from an increasingly severe housing shortage. The city’s population increased roughly tenfold over the course of the nineteenth century. Although that wasn’t an unusual rate of urban growth for the time —and the fastest-growing capital in Europe, Budapest, had people living in trees — Vienna’s housing situation was still comparatively difficult. For one thing, at a time when most cities had already spread beyond their old walls, expansion of Vienna proper was still inhibited by its old fortifications and the military exercise grounds right outside them.
Vienna and suburbs, with space for target practice in between. (public domain)
The city walls were torn down in the late 1850s and replaced by the Ringstrasse. This made room for expansion and new construction, driven mainly by tax cuts and private initiative. But it didn’t create sufficient, affordable housing for the city’s growing population. In fact, a speculative real-estate bubble where the security often rested merely on planned construction was a factor in the Vienna stock market crash of 1873.
Bokelmann, The Broken Bank, 1877 (German, not Austrian, but hey.)
So what were your housing options in Olde Vienna?
1. The street: If lying in the gutter wasn’t your thing, you
could live under a bridge or in a little cave dug into a railway embankment. Young
women sometimes turned to prostitution just to get a bed for the night.
2. Single-family house: In my town of 10,000 in the US, almost everyone lives in one of those. By 1910, there were 2,031,420 people in Vienna and only 5734 single-family homes. By my calculations, that’s one house for every 354 people, so you won’t be surprised to learn they accommodated only 1.2% of the city’s population. Scroll down this blog to see some lovely houses belonging to that 1.2%.
3. Nice apartments: You’ll see a lot of these if, like me, you mainly go to Vienna to commune with dead composers. For example, go here to see the building Franz Schubert was born in. His family lived in one room with a little kitchen alcove, but it was a pretty big room with windows and a courtyard where children could play, so basically a win. And in 1801 they moved to a nicer place. I assume by 1860 or so, anyone who occupied such a dwelling would keep a vice-like grip on it and sub-let only to the classiest tenants.
4. Bassenawohnung or ZKK – two names for the same kind of
squalid apartment for the average citizen. The “Bassena” was a sink in the
hallway, the sole source of running water for a number of apartments. It was
also the place to exchange gossip. “ZKK” stands for “Zimmer, Küche, Kabinett”
(“room, kitchen, closet”). These were
generally 22 to 28 m², with a communal toilet out in the hall by the Bassena.
Some tenement apartments had only 2 rooms (no closet) or really just one and a
bit.
Not only were large families often crammed into these
apartments, but because many of them needed help with the rent they also
sub-let sections of the place to people who couldn’t afford, or perhaps
couldn’t even find, an apartment of their own. Even in the smallest, most crowded apartment there
was room for a “Bettgeher” (a “bed-goer” or bed lodger), who paid for a place
to sleep and nothing else. He might get space in a drawer for his possessions if
he was lucky. In the 1870s, Bettgeher and other sub-renters made up a quarter
of the Viennese population.
“It is almost impossible to penetrate the secret of a
Viennese apartment,” Ingeborg Bachmann wrote, “Even a person’s best friends cannot
do it.” It’s not hard to understand why.
The popularity of the Viennese coffee house, with its cozy opulence, owes much to the fact that people were keen to minimize the amount of time they spent at home. The writer Peter Altenberg exemplified this strategy. He rented a hotel room to sleep in, but the Café Central was where he ate, worked, socialized, and got his mail – essentially, it was where he lived.
Scarcity of resources during the First World War made the housing crisis acute. The Imperial edict for the protection of renters issued in 1917 froze rent, which eased financial pressure on tenants but also turned the overcrowding problem into a homelessness problem when these same tenants kicked out their no-longer-needed Bettgeher. This sparked the Siedlerbewegung or “settler’s movement,” in which thousands of people moved out to the edge of the city to occupy land, plant gardens and build simple shelters out of wood they cut from nearby forests. Within seven years, the movement had grown into 30,000 families managing 6.5 million square meters.
The spirit of this movement flowed into the policy of the Social Democrats, who finally turned Vienna’s housing situation around in the 1920s with a building program for the working classes; their best-known accomplishment is probably the Karl-Marx-Hof. For more about Viennese social housing, with plenty of photos, see this or this or this or this. Interestingly, if you google “Paris housing crisis,” you get articles about how hard it is to find affordable housing in Paris today. If you google “Vienna housing crisis,” the top articles are all about how wonderfully Vienna solved its housing crisis.
If you live in Vienna nowadays, you can’t argue with Karl Kraus over a Mélange but at least you’ll have indoor plumbing and there won’t be a day laborer sleeping on your kitchen floor. As far as the average citizen is concerned, this is probably the best time in history to live there. It sure seems that way from this video by Thomas Pöcksteiner and Peter Jablonowski. Vienna is not forgetting to be awesome.
I got most of the info for this post from The Viennese by Paul Hofmann, Wittgenstein’s Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, and articles by Michael Klein of TU Wien.
Long before Berlitz, Lonely Planet and Let’s Go – long even before Baedeker – there was this handy German phrasebook for travelers from Francia, with the German translated into Vulgar Latin:
I can show you all this thanks to Wilhelm Braune’s Althochdeutsches Lesebuch, which is in the public domain.
You might think this doesn’t look like German. Well, it was a very long time ago. It’s hard to think of anything that looks the same now as it did in the tenth century.
But take a close look and sound it out – you’ll see it’s German. It starts with a list of body parts, moves on to some polite questions like “Where did you find a place for the night, friend?” (15) “What country do you come from?” (20) “What did you do there?” (22), then veers into more dangerous territory with “Hit him in the neck” (38), “Go out” (40), and “Dog’s ass in your nose!” (42). Then the accusations start flying: “Why did you not come to matins?” (60) “You lay down with a woman in your bed” (62) “Upon my head, if your lord knew you were sleeping with the woman he would be truly angry at you.” (63) A trip to tenth-century Germany can go south pretty quickly.
This 1955 book by Milton Mayer, reissued in 2017 by University of Chicago Press with a helpful afterword by Richard Evans, is worth your time if you are interested in human beings.
Mayer, a Chicago native, worked as a freelance journalist and taught Great Books seminars with Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins (he gets a few mentions in Alex Beam’s excellent surveyA Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books). Descended from German Jews who had fled to America after the failed revolutions of 1848, he also belonged to the Society of Friends and coined the phrase “Speak truth to power.”
They Thought They Were Free is based on a project he undertook in Germany with the support of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt (Theodor Adorno et al). He settled in Marburg (called “Kronenberg” in the book) and conducted a series of lengthy interviews with ten former Nazis in the area, hoping to get a detailed sense of how “a typical German of small status” developed into a National Socialist.
He told them he was a Professor from America who wanted to learn about what life had been like in Germany during the war. His approach was friendly and humble — he arrived at their homes on foot, bringing gifts, and listened sympathetically to whatever they had to say. Sometimes their children played with his. He never told them he was Jewish or that he had access to their denazification records, which would have been a bit of a conversation killer. Surprisingly, he didn’t speak much German and believed this to be an advantage: if his subjects could feel they were talking down to him, teaching him to say “auf Wiedersehen” and whatnot, they would feel less intimidated and be more likely to speak freely (he did bring along an interpreter).
The resulting book has compelling personal stories and valuable insights. It is definitely worth reading. However, it also gets bogged down in musings on national character that will seem tiresome and cliché to most readers nowadays. I actually lost patience with the second half and didn’t finish it.
At its best, though, the book offers the kind of individual moral histories that everyone can learn from:
But the one great
shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never
comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had
come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have
been sufficiently shocked. […] But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In
between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each
of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much
worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you
at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late,
your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The
burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my
case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it
all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed
completely under your nose. The world you live in – your nation, your people –
is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all
untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the
visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never
noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms,
is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate
and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one
is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility
even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning,
but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
You have gone almost
all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of
acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without
any effort on your part. […] Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see
what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done
(for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You
remember those early meetings of your department and the university when, if
one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small
matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than
that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are
compromised beyond repair.
Deutsch für Amerikaner, my mom’s old German textbook (copyright 1960) is an interesting social-history artifact. Here’s a passage where a university student from Germany discusses the American family he’s staying with. (All these people are fictional of course, but intended to be representative of their time and place.)
WHO IS HEAD OF THE HOUSEHOLD?
The day before yesterday Prof. Welliver, who is an enthusiastic hunter, took a day off to go pheasant hunting. A neighbor who also hunts came at 6:30 in the morning to pick him up. At six he was in the kitchen frying himself a couple of eggs for breakfast. I was also up early doing a term paper and he invited me to have breakfast with him. I was surprised that neither Mrs. Welliver nor one of his daughters had gotten up to help him.
He must have read my thoughts because he said: “Yes, my wife and daughters don’t think much of hunting and they think my enthusiasm for hunting is a bit queer.
So I can’t expect that they’ll get up at 5:30 in the morning. Where you’re from in Germany a professor can afford to hire a maid. But I can’t do that. Our American girls and women would rather work in factories and offices than in other people’s houses. That’s understandable. And then, of course, maids can charge so much money that a university professor can’t afford to keep one.”
Then I asked him: “May I ask a personal question?”
“Shoot!” he laughed.
“I can imagine your wife is tired,” I said, “but why did neither of your two daughters get up to make you breakfast?”
Prof. Welliver laughed: “They are also too tired. The life of an American girl in high school is more strenuous than you think.”
I looked at him with astonishment, because I knew that high school students here did not work nearly as hard as we do. He said his daughters were very popular and that meant they had to be at everything. Then Prof. Welliver saw that I had nothing left on my plate. “More toast, Karl, another egg?” Before I could answer, he had already put the bread in the toaster and cracked an egg into the pan. How friendly and affectionate it sounds when this professor with gray hair who specializes in the Reformation calls me Karl! And what a charming host he is! On such occasions I always feel something of the warm-heartedness and true humanity that could only have developed in democratic America.
And who is Prof. Welliver’s hunting partner? A dean? A colleague? An academic? Not at all! The neighbor is the manager of a grocery store in the center of our little university town. But the two men called each other by their first names, as I noticed when the professor got into the gleaming car.
Kolonialwarengeschäft!
I had offered to wash the dishes. How quickly one gets used to the American way of life! In Germany I would not have dared to offer a professor my help in his house, because it would have embarrassed him even if he didn’t have a maid. The thing about the maid is not so tragic, by the way. Mrs. Welliver does not have a maid but she has a refrigerator, a freezer, a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine with automatic dryer, an electric dishwasher, in other words everything that American technology has to offer the housewife.
However, it’s not the case that she has more freedom than a German housewife. She has many social duties. School, church, clubs and the social lives of her two daughters fill her days and some of her evenings.
I didn’t really like the fact that neither of the two girls had gotten up to help their father. And that they made fun of his hunting seemed to me disrespectful, considering their young age. This lack of paternal authority, or male authority in general, bothers me as a German especially. I know the absolute authority of the man, as was considered a given in Germany – especially Germany before the First World War – is not ideal. I myself know German families where the daughter cleans the father’s and brothers’ shoes on Sunday mornings while the “men” are still peacefully sleeping.
As a cultural critic, when I see something like that, I shake my head sadly. I do the same when I see Prof. Welliver’s daughters with their “boy friends” here in the house.
These visits by the “boy friends” are arranged through long telephone conversations. When the girls speak to their young men, neither the professor nor Mrs. Welliver nor I can get on the phone, because these conversations go on for hours. They giggle, and the most trivial things are discussed earnestly, to the point where you could think these girls were not entirely normal. But that’s not true. That’s just how they talk with their young friends. When I talk to them, all at once they become different people, very mature, very intelligent and full of interest in anything that is worth knowing.
If the “dates” come into the house, they have no consideration for anybody. The young people laugh and scream and dance to loud music from the record player. The fact that their father is sitting in his office upstairs working on one of his publications obviously does not bother them at all and their father doesn’t say anything. I always expect the door to his office to fly open and for him to demand quiet with a thundering voice. But that is a German expectation. The office door opens, but the professor just goes down to greet his young guests and tell them “Have a good time!”
But there’s one more thing I should mention. The girls’ long telephone conversations prevent me from using the phone, but they’re useful to me nonetheless. I have to listen, because the phone is at the foot of the stairs near my room. This way I can expand my American vocabulary and my list of untranslatable words. But I still don’t know why a certain Bill is “a card,” a certain Joe is “a square,” a certain Bob is “a doll,” and a certain Hank is “a creep”.
Clara Schumann: the Artist and the Woman by Nancy B. Reich
If you’ve ever read The Gulag Archipelago, you probably remember the story where nobody wanted to be the first to stop clapping for Comrade Stalin:
The applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! […] They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! […] Nine minutes! Ten!…Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers.
The one who finally had the nerve to sit down first after 11 minutes was sent to the Gulag, of course. But what interests me about this passage right now is that 11 minutes seemed like an insane amount of applause to all involved.
Think about that, and then consider: at a concert she gave on February 27, 1837 in Berlin, Clara Wieck got an hour and half of thunderous applause.
An hour and a half! That’s the time it takes to watch a full-length film, and Clara Wieck made people want to spend it banging their hands together. That’s how good she was.
In Clara Schumann, The Artist and the Woman, Nancy B. Reich explains how she became one of the greatest pianists of the 19th century. Her father, the piano teacher Friedrich Wieck, zeroed in on her as the most talented of his children and dedicated his life to making her a great musician and a star.
Here are the things Clara Wieck was allowed to do as a child:
Play the piano
Take long walks
Eat
Sleep
I guess we can also include “write in her diary,” although often it was her father who did so – in her voice. “Father arrived by express coach at seven in the evening,” he wrote in one entry, “I flew into his arms and took him right to the Hotel Stadt Frankfurt.” Wieck was so possessive about his daughter’s childhood diaries that she was forty years old by the time he agreed to relinquish them to her.
Wieck was not only possessive and controlling but also fierce – Robert Schumann once visited his home to find him dragging one of Clara’s younger brothers around by the hair as a punishment for substandard violin playing. “Am I among humans?” wondered Robert in his own diary.
At home with the Wiecks
So, given a range of options, most of us wouldn’t choose Friedrich Wieck as a dad. To be fair, though, by applying his merciless training to her natural aptitude, he did succeed in making Clara a musician of the highest order. Hence the hour and a half of applause.
Unsurprisingly, Wieck was loath to allow any other man to take his Clara away and hated Robert Schumann with a passion (he also ended up hating the guy he invited over to distract her from Robert Schumann). Clara and Robert had to sue him for permission to marry; Wieck submitted a statement to the court to the effect that Robert “could not help Clara with her career since he was socially inept […]; that he crippled his finger through his own stupidity; that he lied about his income; that he had been badly brought up and displayed an indescribable egotism and unlimited vanity; that he was a solitary drinker and drank to excess, and that he did not really love Clara – he wanted to use her for his own purposes and live off the money she earned as an artist.”
Also interesting is his assertion that Clara, “having been trained as an artist, was unfit to run a home.” This reminds me of Piero Melograni’s biography of Mozart, where he argues that the popular conception of Mozart as practically incapable of functioning in society (cf. Amadeus) comes from his family’s attempt to convince themselves and anyone who would listen that he couldn’t get along without them. Perhaps it’s always that way with child prodigies.
This book gives a thorough account of Clara as a musician, teacher, and composer. It also includes juicy gossip, like what a dead weight of a husband Robert eventually became with his mercurial (literally?) moods and inability to handle….anything, really, before he finally broke with reality altogether (Wieck wasn’t entirely wrong about him); or everything you ever wanted to know about Clara and Brahms. Peter Schickele’s Interear Telecommuniculture Phone ™ sketch, where the dial-up request for a Schumann symphony includes the option, “If you would like to hear this piece as the composer would have written it if he had known that Brahms had the hots for his wife, press 3,” left teenage me with the impression that this was a long-simmering love triangle. But Brahms only met Robert and Clara about 6 months before Robert attempted suicide and went to live in a padded room.
Brahms was there with Clara when Robert died two years later. They had a deep and fruitful relationship and he probably was in love with her, although he was probably also in love with her daughter Julie. Life is complicated.
Anyway, this book is well researched and well written, and it’s still in print, so there’s no excuse for you not to read it. You can also listen to this:
