The 1940s and the 2020s, and Peace

As the years of World War II have ended in the weekly historical experiment, I've picked the experiment up again in the year 1946.

I didn't research it much, however, and therefore mostly spent the day just distancing myself from post-1940s technology in the form of the personal computer.

After eating a breakfast of croissants with Mama and our youngest brother, Ge. and I went for a walk to the Kreuzberg. It was a bright day with a pale blue spring sky, and other park-goers were also taking advantage of it as a police car slowly cruised past us. While the boxwood bushes have new yellow-green leaves and buds, and rosebushes have a few sprigs, and the sight of lawns with sun splashing on them was a pleasant novelty, the trees are still bare and the night frost lingered on the dead leaves and the ground where the sun didn't reach. In the city panorama that radiates from the top of the memorial — the glinting gold sculpture on the Siegessäule, Potsdamer Platz, church peaks, the TV tower, palatial domes of other religious buildings ... — we saw graduated clusters of apartment buildings that are usually sunk in a haze or shut out of sight by tree leaves. We spoke English, and so did most of the other people standing around the memorial.

Pale yellow and purple crocuses, in long bullet-like buds, were the only spring flowers we saw; snowdrops don't grow everywhere, clearly, and winter aconites don't seem to have appeared yet or to be popular either.

After tending to my houseplants, I played the piano: compositions from the 1930s by someone named William Alward, which our Aunt N. had picked up for her sheet music collection; and the beginning of Isaac Albéniz's "La Vega." Hopefully I can explore more of Aunt N.'s mid-century repertoire next week — Bela Bartók is next. Later, in the evening, I finished the project that I started last year: playing Beethoven's 16th through 32nd piano sonatas all the way through. I like the 32nd (and Beethoven's last) sonata, the 'Halloween' sonata with the gothic beginning and the meditative continuation, and had already listened to a Sviatoslav Richter recording and played much of it before. It is easier to do it justice, understanding what the music is supposed to do, than a few of his other late sonatas. So the project ended on a good note.

(The piano project went into its next stage today: The next challenge is playing all the way through a collection of Bach's works. The Italian Concerto is finished and his Ouverture in the French style is in progress; both of these are pretty familiar, especially as the Concerto was part of my daily rotation in the late 2000s. In honour of Papa's preference, I am trying to lay off the damper pedal while still achieving fairly sonorous notes.)

In the evening I took a look at clothes in our mending pile, and darned a sock that had a hole as big as a walnut. (Speaking of which, it's funny that 'whole' and 'hole' rhyme and are practically antonyms.)

Besides I figured out how to operate our record player again, put on a recording of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos from the 1950 Prades Festival, and then read a few newspaper articles, more of Gogol's short stories, and more of Canadian author Esi Edugyan's Berlin-based historical novel Half Blood Blues.

Listening to the second side of the Brandenburg Concerto record didn't go so well, as dust collected on the stylus and the music hopped back and forth and became extremely fuzzy. With metaphorical sweat drops standing on my brow, I picked the dust off the prong and then put on a recording of a Haydn concerto conducted by Antal Dorati in 1957. Haydn can be played in a mild and wholesome way, or in a sinister way, I've found; and perhaps due to the mood I was in, I felt there was an element of the sinister in this one.

That said, with my pencil skirt, blouse-necked shirt, cardigan, and thick socks, I felt uncomfortably conservative and stuffy. Besides, wearing thick socks with tight-fitting dance pumps was a terrible idea. Altogether I was glad to change into a hoodie, cargo pants and slippers again in the evening.

In the meantime I've finished skimming through an anthology of Lord Tennyson's poetry. I used to read it over and over again in my twenties, and have often met quotations in other books (Laura Ingalls Wilder's, Louisa May Alcott's, and Lucy Maud Montgomery's, for example); it was a nice, nostalgic read. It's also good to feel a little humility, and that happened when I compared his poetry with some that I've written. That said, some of his lesser poetry ... either snooze-worthy or kitschy or cringeworthily over-patriotic.

All this aside, I was brooding about work much of the time, and although a few reassuring things have happened, I've been sleeping so badly that on Friday yet another colleague (seeing my wan visage in a video call) asked if I was feeling all right.

But the main thing that is casting a shadow over this past week or two, is the uncertainty if there will be war in the Ukraine. As we discussed at the breakfast table today, we no longer really know if we'll wake up to hear that Russian tanks have rolled in. At least in my workplace there is a healthy anti-war solidarity between the Russian and Ukrainian colleagues.

I read yesterday evening (preparing my research for spending Saturday in 1947 next week) of a dance hall fire in Berlin shortly after World War II. It was the first time in a while where the city curfew was relaxed for a celebration. The building was overpacked, and as a cruelly cold winter around the Northern Hemisphere had pushed down the temperatures to below -20°C, the stoves were running at full blast. Stove pipes kindled a fire in which around 81 people were trapped and died. Amongst those 81 people were '3 or 6' British soldiers who had tried to rescue the partygoers. It touched me deeply that, two years after German soldiers had been slaughtering British soldiers and civilians, these British soldiers had put their lives at risk for German citizens. I think I will never understand human nature! Seemingly so quick to wage war, at times, and then also so quick to act to save lives.