Ptak Science Books

Fantastic Cover Art: a Picture of the Future of Television

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This image is that of the television antenna of station WNBT and for many years it sat on top of the Empire State Building.  WNBT was the flagship station of NBC, which was owned by RCA (Radio Corporation of America, 1919-1986) which (according to its name) was really the first national broadcasting radio network in the United States, and which (as experimental station W2XBS) became the first to broadcast a television picture (of a papier mache Felix the Cat) in 1928.  This fantastic cover art for a 1947 promotional for the company pictured the famous antenna,  the great visual of the company's external hardware, right there on top of the world's tallest building. 

This was really a picture of the future, and in 1947 the future of mass communications and entertainment (and in making money in the two) was seen in television, much more so than the formerly gargantuan radio. 

I just really like the design of this pamphlet's cover...A small poster-size reproduction is being sold (along with the original pamphlet) at our blog bookstore, here.

The Movie as Morgue: the Imperialism of Technology over Memory?

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I was just thinking about the period of 1876-1900 or so and a few of the advancements in technology--telephone, motion picture--and how they changed the landscape of how people saw things in the present, and how they altered the very way in which memory worked. I've come up with a couple of questions:

1.  When was the first time that a person was able to see a dead person--personally known to them--appear "alive" in a motion picture?  How disorienting could that be, say, to see Uncle Henry or Mother walk past a camera at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, have Uncle or Mother die in 1894, and then see them, again, strolling, in 1899? 

1.1  Would the dead-preserving daguerreotype have prepared people for the experience of the next step of seeing the dead people, this time in motion? 

1.12  Daguerre's and later photographic processes would have allowed people to clearly see the faces of the Departed even decades after death.  Certainly this was a triumph of technology and a change ways a hundred centuries old of remembering what dead people looked like.  What did this mean to the people in the first generation of humans who were able to experience this?

1.2.  I wonder if it would have been possible to operate a business--say, in 1895--that specialized in making simple one-reel motion pictures of family members and then contracting to save the movie for decades. 

1.2.1  The movie house would become a Morgue.  Family members or whomever could come and see these motion pictures with dead people in them.  It would be like a moving, visual cemetery.

2. What did the invention of the telephone mean to people who now could with utmost ease communicate via voice without being face-to-face with the other person?  

2.1  The telephone was also a great democratizer--it meant that anyone with access to a telephone could talk to anyone at the number that was dialed.  In the age of introduction and more-visible class warfare, this was a novel idea.

3.  What was it like for the first time people were able to experience interrupted motion?  That is, for people in a cinema, or seeing a motion picture somewhere, that they could be among the first humans in the history of humans to be able to slow or stop human action as filmed in  a motion picture, to see motion frame-by-frame, or (perhaps, if not too explosive) to see that action stopped, and started, at will?

 

3.1.  And what did people think when they could see such things as interrupted and suspended motion, that they could see it all backwards? And over and over again? It had to have been an overwhelming sensation of newness and the unexpected.

3.2  It certainly meant a lot scientifically, with Marey instituting a study of locomotion; and also for the arts, as there is really no telling what impact these sorts of images would have had on people who were read/studied by those like M. Duchamp and his Nude Descending, or to the creation of alternative narratives in literature.

How did these inventions alter the way in which we remembered things, and how we remembered them?

If we fast forward (!) to the present, what might it mean to the way our memory works if we can commit so much of what we come into contact with to the cloudy intertubes? Obviously we today come into contact with x-orders of magnitude more data/information than ever experienced in the course of human history (and perhaps we experience more data input than the "average" person would have experienced over a period of a collective century or centuries or _________), and so I wonder about how the brain discriminates between necessary and allocated memory?

Again, just some thinking-out-loud notes...

 

The Gift that Keeps on Giving: Radium, in Powder or Suppository

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Radium.  It was for some short period of time a magnificent and harmless thing, soemthing with a life of its own, sort of, in the way that people used to think of electricity. 

This is a detail for an advertisement for radium salts, found in the December, 1903 issue of Le Radium.  At this point, just five years after the Curies discovered it and quick-published (in five days) their results in the Comptes Rendus..., the massive biochemical effects of human/radium interaction was not understood. And so the ads for firms like Armet de Lisle, which  was loudly selling Sels de Radium (and other radioactive substances like uranium salt  and uranium phosphate) without any real knowledge of the adverse health effects of its products.  (The Curies and Becquerel had noticed ulcertating reactions to their skin when it was left in contact to radium, and "radium dementia" had been reported beginning about 1900, but it would take quite some time for this radioactive material to be understood as lethal products.)

Radium was used (in very small dosages) for the illuminating of instrument panels and dials (in, say, aircraft) and wrist watch faces into the 1960, though the major health factors ground themselves out in the worker who would come into contact with the radium itself. 

Of course there were other uses for radium as a cure-all, which would have been a completely different story:

[which I wrote about here in "Radium Dance"]

History of Holes series: Holes in Airships (1919 and 1937)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1736 [History of Holes series.]

Holes are of course everywhere--it just depends on how hard you look.  This image, though, struck me very quickly as an unexpected hole (though of course once you allow yourself a moment to think about ti the whole thing makes sense).  It is a very plain "observer's perch" in the tail of the great British airship, the "R 34", and appeared in the Illustrated London News in April, 1919, just before its first flight.  The aircraft was massive--643 feet long¹--and on one superficial level its hard to imagine holes in its structure of any sort, let alone an unprotected observation post.  But there it is.

And this

Here's a full view of the "R34", successor to the "R33":

This is an image of the (forward?) gondola of the airship, looking like it has come in for a landing, or touchdown, or whatever--there is something so very primal about this relatively small group of men reaching up for the railing on the gondola...a railing placed there specifically for that reason.  Its hard to imagine that such a seemingly small effort would be enough to control any part of the airship's motion, though perhaps it was. 

And the detail, showing the man in the middle clearly off the ground--clearly he must be weighing his options:

At least he seems to be wearing one glove, anyway

Then there's the image of the "bad" hole, the iconic image (photographic and motion picture) of the conflagration and crash of the Hindenburg, a result of a very quickly-spreading "hole" in the skin of the aircraft as it was coming in for a landing/mooring in Lakehurst, New Jersey, 1937.

Here's a cross-section of the Hindenburg as it appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1936:

Notes:

Specs on the "R34":

• Length: 643 ft 0 in (196 m)
• Diameter: 79 ft 0 in (24 m)
• Volume: 1,950,000 ft³ (55,000 m³)
• Useful lift: 58,240 lb (26,470 kg)
• Powerplant: 5 × Sunbeam Maori, 275 hp (205 kW) each

The Hindenburg was quite a bit larger than the R34--in fact, it was the largest thing ever to fly, at 803 feet long and 135 feet in diameter...and 200,000 m³, almost 200% larger than the mammoth R34.

 

 

The Obviousness of Oblivion

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  [Post 1002 expanded from April 2010]                   

  [Another in a long series of post on atomic and nuclear weapons.]

Perhaps nothing is obvious unless it is established or labeled so; perhaps the obviousness must be stated at least once before it can be officially, recognizably, the case.  And perhaps the greater the obviousness is, the more the need to make it officially so.  Perhaps nothing is so incredibly obvious that it can be studied and dissected and established.

This seems to be more the case in more recent history than in time more further removed: that millions of dollars can be spent “proving” that children do not like to be separated from their mothers, or that cars will go faster downhill than up, or that people will respond to proper medication better than not, and so on, so on into the night, just seem not to need a vastly-funded proof.

And so the case with nuclear warfare, people, and cities.

In this RAND report from 1956, the great issue seems to be laid to rest, once and for all: the problem with nuclear weapons being exploded in/over cities is that since cities are filled with people, people will be killed.  And if those people in the cities are there because of professions that depend on city-settings, then more of those people will be killed than not.  

But what this report was really about was the unfortunate aspect of the impact if nuclear warfare on leadership and working positions in significant and strategic industrial/business/government professions.  And what the report finds is this: since the vast majority of these positions are located in cities (defined as 100,000 population and above), and since cities will be the major targets in a nuclear “exchange”, the overwhelming majority of these people will be killed, thus leading to strategic human resource vacancies post-war. 

It seems that 95% of aeronautical engineers in the U.S. would be killed in a nuclear war, which I guess would mean that it would be difficult to design new aircraft and such in the post apocalypse world.  Of course these people would be killed because it was their industrial base that was being targeted and they were collateral damage, so there wouldn’t be any industrial base to produce the components necessary to build, say, a B-52.  That part of the equation is not addressed here, though.  Nor is there any sort of recommendation presented to fix the problem.

The RAND document just painfully points out the obvious, once and for all; no one really knew what to do with the information now that it was there, in black and white. Certain people could be evacuated, saved from the maelstrom; but saved for what?  There were other evacuation plans that were completely doomed from the beginning, sheltering plans, Dr. Strangelove arrangements, but all of that would come into their pitiful being later on.

First, though, the bitter reality of what everyone already knew--one of the greatest of all obviousnesses–had to be make its appearance in print.  And so it did.

Singular Placards and Perhaps a Singular Christianity?

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I found this rather, um, provocative pamphlet that asks, right up front on the cover of the thing, "Should the Christian Church Resign?"  The author, who I think is the man holding the placard on the cover, is Benjamin H. Dinnick (Cardiff, Wales) who published the work in the 1930's. 

I'm reproducing the cover and one of Mr. Dinnick's impenetrable diagrams--I can't really say what he was after or what he was for, but I find the images interesting. 

A Note on the Vast Wealth Possibilities of the Refill Business: Ink and Paper

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1735

[Source: Columbia University computing history site, here.]

I guess that the only reason why HP charges for their printers is that they can.  When you buy one of these products you're basically purchasing the need to keep the things fed with semi-proprietary HP ink--and as everyone knows, printers are notoriously thirsty creatures, and one can easily spend multiples of the cost of the printer on ink in the first year alone. 

This is a great idea so far as the manufacturer goes, but it is hardly a new one--International Business Machines counted on this sort of income for several decades, partially getting the company through the Great Depression. 

And what was the IBM necessary-suppliable that their customers had to keep buying over and over?  It was the business machines themselves, because it was IBM practice to rent their machines out (which would pay for the initial investment and production in the machine in about two years, and most customers seemed to keep their rented mater1al for 5 or 7 or 10 years.  What IBM kept supplying their customers with was the stuff that they sent through the machines--the IBM cards.  The customer needed the cards from IBM itself, mainly because it was part of the contractual agreement for the lease of the machine, and also because the IBM product was superior to other mass-produced cards.  In the 1930's the card business for IBM accounted to something like a few billion cards per year, which evidently would account for 30-40% of IBM's yearly profit.  And that's quite something. 

The idea of the necessary refill is not IBM's to claim for themselves--years earlier, Eastman Kodak accomplished the same deal with film for their cameras; and razor blades were supplied by Gillette to users of their razors.  And although you don't need Ford gasoline to run a Ford automobile, in the 1930's you did need a General-Motors spark plug to run a G-M vehicle.  Radio Corporation of America sold radios and also the necessary tubes to replace the ones in the stock radio; Thomas Edison too had a vastly controlling interest on how his light bulbs would be installed and replaced. 

So as annoying as it might be to have to pay a fair amount of money for a small amount of ink to make your printer function, the printer-producing companies are just following an old (and highly profitable) business practice. 

Sawing Through the Catalonian Mountains, 1499

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

The beautifully-named Gerardus de Zutphanis wrote de spiritualibus ascensionbus, a lovely gothic-lettered work of 84 leaves, in 1499, in the fifth decade passed the Gutenberg invention.  It was published in Montserrat--in Catalonian Spain, some 4,000' or so about the valley floor-- by Joseph Luschner, in the mountain keep of the Benedictine abbey there. 

The woodcut image reproduced here was used as a printer's device, and in it, remarkably, are shown not only the abbey, as well as some others as indicated by the series of crucifixes, but the improbable figure of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child with both seemingly sawing their way through a mountain.  Its a magnificent thing--I particularly enjoy the use of dots in shading the mountainsides. 

The press--or the business, the publisher that is--that produced this work is still in business today.

Lunar "Firsts"--the First Image of the Moon using the Telephone?

Perhaps, or perhaps not, but what this image does seem to show is a conversation between the Moon and Mr. Punch.  It appears as a small text woodcut in a long series of short stories in Punch, or the London Charivari, called "What Mr. Punch's Moon Saw", 14 September 1889.

Mr. Bell just barely beat a host of competitor's for his telephone patent 13 years earlier, and the telephone didn't really get semi-"widespread" use in London until at least the mid-1880's, so it is really quite possible that this is the first time that the Moon is shown engaged on the 'phone. 

On the Center of Everything (continued)

JF Science Book

Continuation of  Visual Chronology of Cosmology Part 1 and Visual Chronology of Cosmology Part II,.

I started out in this post to write about the scholar pictured in Andrew Borde's book, The Breuiary of Healthe, for all maner of syckenesses and diseaes, Expressynge the obscure terms of Greke, Araby, Latyn, and Barbary, in Engluish concernying Phisicke and Chierurgerie...., which was printed in London in 1556.  Underneath this rather long title is perhaps the earliest "modern" work on hygiene--or at least (in a real test of qualifications) it was the first book written by a medical man on hygiene that was originally written and published in English.  In its way it is a wonderful book, being a compendium, really, of 384 short chapters on the this-and-that of medicine, all alphabetically arranged, which made it a simpler book to compose than a full treatise on the subject arranged in a medically-logical way.  But what I liked in it was the contrasting image of the scholar, which to me is the very picture of ennui, laid side-by-side with the chief element by which this book is probably best remembered, which is "Myrth is one of the chiefest thygnes in physicke" (or "humor is the best medicine").  Borde's scholar may not be taking his own medicine, here.   

In looking for the text for this fine book I came across something else, Borde's Aristotelian celestial spheres in his  The First Book of the Introduction of Knowledge, printed in 1542, the year before the publication of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus. It is a magnificent woodcut, and tells the story of a vision of mankind that would soon come to vast change. 

Source:  the Luminarium, here.

The image shows us the geocentric universe, the creation, and eleven-sphere unit that follows the Earth at center and the four subluminaries (earth wind air fire), followed by the orbit of the Moon and Mercury and Venus, after which comes the Sun, followed by the rest of the planets.  These spheres are followed by the fixed stars/the starry firmament), and ultimately by the Primum Mobile, divided into the crystalline heaven, the first mover, and the Empyrean.  Its a beautiful image. 

The following is in a sense a cross-section of the Borde image, which shows pretty much the same information (with the Sun being in the fourth sphere).  This is manuscript is more than a hundred years earlier than the Borde, and accurately represents the elements of cosmology of the time.

Image source:  Luminarium, here; From Les Echecs amoureux ("Amorous Chess") Manuscript made for Louise of Savoy, 15th c.  Bibliothèque nationale de France, département des Manuscrits; Mss.fr.143, fo 20.

An even earlier version of this more-or-less static image, the perfect image of the perfect creation in which all of the stars in the visible sky were always there, in some perfect number, in the configurations for all time. (This idea of course would be one of the greatest disfigurers of ancient thought that the telescope of Galileo  would provide.)

Source:  Spheres Surrounded by Angels, Brevari d'amour, late 14th c

Robert  Fludd, a visionary of a different sort, as his celestial sphere will show:

And here in detail:

Universal Correspondence from Fludd's Utriusque Cosmi Historia, 1617.Rob

Fludd’s (1574-1637)  features a complicated astrological existence well beyond the point of Copernicus.  In addition to everything else, real and imagined, Rosicrucianism and astrology and puffy-birds, Fludd, who was  an English physician, delved deeply into the real stuff of the world in this book in addition to all of the other make-believe--optics, the musical intervals, perspective drawing, hydraulic engineering, construction of lifting machines, military engineering and many other interesting, physical science topics.  But this drawing, right there on the title page, reveals Fludd’s real interests and shows what governs what he does.  Everything else, the math and and the physics, services this need.  Of course the image is beautiful, which is why it is here, but it is also a deeply personal, exploitative, cover-all for the things that Fludd *wanted* to find.

The Great Passaic Textile Strike of 1926

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1734

This broadside was an appeal to like-minded people to contribute to a fund to help relieve thew dire conditions of textile worker strikers in Passaic, New Jersey, in 1926.  There were more than 16,000 people involved in this sometimes-brutal strike, people who were trying to stay even in their lives, looking for a little more money and a little better working conditions than what they had.  The Passiac (a working city just south of Patterson in an industrial triangle section of the state) strikers were moving against a number of textile (wool and silk) mills there, trying to force management to pay them something closer to the $1400 annual income for a family of four to survive. 

[This great piece of American ephemera is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.]

Most workers there were making $1,000-$1,200 a year ($800-$1,000 if the worker was a woman, and about half of them were) for 50+ hours of labor per week.  The result was that the workers could not afford good housing and food, and those disadvantages paid off in high rates of tuberculosis, very high incidence of child mortality, and a low average life expectancy.  The strike began slowly in January 1926, with the mills responding with vicious attacks by paid thugs and by police.  IT was a long and involved process for the strikers, with the strike lasting its way for another 14 months, finally getting choked out in March 1927.  It looks like there were some victories, but those seem mainly pyrrhic to me--at the end of the process many of the strikers were hired back but soon terminated, replaced by other workers who agreed to work for less.

There's quite  a bit written on this strike, and most seem to say that it was an important event in the history of "labor relations", and that it was the first time that a Communist-led strike succeeded in the United States, (There is a complex legacy as to who the leadership was for this strike, but the end result is that, at the end, the Communists were in charge.)

But what I wanted to say here about this broadside was the communal effort involved with keeping the strikers (and the strike) going.  The strikers needed money to live, as there was certainly no money coming in, and since there was obviously no union, there was no general fund from which any of these families could draw food money from). they needed money just to buy food and pay for housing.  SO the call for "Give all you can!" and "Give right away!" were as desperate as they sounded.  My guess is that there would be a representative of the International Workers Aid society national office going from factory to factory, or door-to-door, soliciting for money for the Passaic workers' relief.  The strike was no doubt a very nasty business, with a victory only a victory once there was more food on the table, less illness, and far fewer babies dying from preventable causes. Probably this looked like a victory to others so far as the future of fair labor/pay was concerned, but not so much for the strikers who brought this about. 

It is also interesting to note that this copy was given at some point to H.L. Mencken, who gave it right away to the Library of Congress, where it wound up in a forgotten "Pamphlet Collection", and then sold to me (years afterwards).

 

 

The History of Lines series: the String of Empire, 1908

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 1733

It is astonishing sometimes to think about how much was accomplished with so little.  This photograph, found in the 6 June 1908 issue of the Illustrated London News, entitled "The Threads of Every Man's Maze:  Arranging Railway Time-Tables" (sub-titled "the ingenious system of threads which secure the perfect working of a great railway system") is just such a case in point of wonder.  Each section of the board represents one hour, top to bottom; these are further subdivided by thinner lines representing 5-minute intervals; the horizontal lines representing the distances between stations.  And the guys in the foreground are keeping the whole thing up-to-minute, using string and tacks. 

This was the British Empire at about its loftiest heights, with a spectacular internal railroading system, kept all in line and on time and correct with the help of heavy thumbs.  Can you think of a better way to display all of this complex data (with 1910 technology)  in real-time so that it is all intelligible--and to be so instantly?  I can't.  This was just sheer, simple, brilliance.

I know, I know, this is actually "thread", but so it goes.  If you elongated and strengthened this concept just a bit you'd come up with rope and wire, and chains--the most simple metallic form of which was used by surveyors for hundreds of years to help map our earth.  And I won't even get close to the String Theory stuff here, or stringed instruments--but if I did, I would want to talk a little about perhaps the ultimate string/cosmology image in the history of science, which would be Robert Fludd and his fantastical thought-experiment  called "Monochordum mundi". from his Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, printed in 1617.

Fludd makes an elaborate and beautiful stab at understanding the deepest aspects of an imagined supramusical relationship between the order and rationality and mathematical aspects of music and the functioning of the universe—based on sound itself.  These ideas come up time and time again, most visually pleasing in Fludd, but most dramatically argued by Johannes (Harmonicae Mundi, "Music of the Spheres") Kepler.  But Fludd trumps with god’s graphical intervention.

The hand of god makes an appearance here as it adjusts the magic monochord of creation--a Pythagorean monochord of two octaves which are then divided into harmonic intervals.  But god's hand is definitely there, doing some sort of adjustment (or perhaps even holding the slipping peg in place?), which is actually a little bit late in the history of the mechanical universe being turned by the hand of the creator, with the hand actually depicted doing the job.  In general the hand stopped making appearances by this point in the history of science, but did manage to linger on in the work of Fludd.

Re-publishing a Rare Work on French Parachutists, 1943

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I've always enjoyed reading about the Airborne, and when I came across this pamphlet it looked immediately interesting. It was printed in England (1940-1943 or so) for distribution (I guess) in occupied France or to the French in exile, and possibly for recruit (but at least for a hearts and minds campaign to show that France was fighting back).  It tells quite a story in its pictures, which to me shows men trying to do as much as they can with, well basically nothing. 

The pamphlet shows up nowhere, not even in the massive 70-million item librarians' reference database, the OCLC.  So I decided to scan the whole (short) thing and make it available.  Enjoy. [The original is also offered for sale in our blog bookstore, here.]

Courageous "Degenerate" Art, 1937

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1731

I came upon this pamphlet out in the warehouse, and I was reminded again of the greatness and courage of some of the anti-NSDAP/Hitler artists in Germany in the early period of Nazism, 1933-1936.   There were many who were overtly anti-Nazi--like George Grosz and John Heartfield--in the political messages that were their artwork; then there were those  (like Felixmueller, Wollein, Otto Dix, Max Pechstein) who became enemies of the Nazi state because they chose to depcit the horrors of war or poverty or other social ills

["Brains Behind Barbed Wire", with a woodcut by Frans Masereel.]

John Heartfield, Blood and Iron, 1934

And then, as the Nazis consolidated power they erected an enormous edifice of propaganda and thought control, codified in law and absorbed into societal practice, where artists and writers and their artwork and books and ideas were banned, being "deliberate sabotage of national defense".   The books were burned, the art removed or sold or destroyed or hidden, the writers and artists threatened with extinction as well:  deported, thrown away, controlled, imprisoned, sent to concentration camps, murdered. 

[War and Corpses, by John Hearfield, 1932.]

One way of another, they were mostly gotten rid of--the paintings and other works of those who were abroad or dead or otherwise not-reachable; and the art as well as the artists who were still in Germany, and whose presence could be controlled.

["Max Klinger", Volk in Ketten. Deutschalnds Weg ins Chaos, 1934]

Some of the artists who were not able to escape, or who were Jewish and who did no tget sent to concentration camps, were murdered via the infamous Aktion 4 or T4 program--the mass murder of the physically disabled, the sick, the weak, the "moral degenerate", and those too incapacitated to take care of themselves.  The name comes from the address of the organization responsible for it, at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin--the  Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil- und Anstaltspflege, [or Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care] which was run from (at least ) 1939 to 1945 under the direction of Recihsleiter Philipp Bouhler (who unfortunately escaped life by suicide after being captured by the Americans in May 1945). 

[From Wiki: "This poster (from around 1938) reads: "60,000 Reichsmarks is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People's community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too. Read '[A] New People', the monthly magazine of the Bureau for Race Politics of the NSDAP."]

To make things easier on the German mind, the NSDAP selected artists and entire art movements that were to be banned as "degenerate", and displayed them in an infamous 1937 show called Entartete Kunst ("Degenerate Art").  

The people who committed their beliefs about the great Evil Thing that was National Socialism, those who committed their thoughts in art or literature, and did so in the 1933-1937 period, were brave people.  Hitler and Goebbels and the rest of the Nazi machine deeply appreciated the influence of visual images, being great practioners in the idea themselves, only though with vastly different content.

The great social commentator/satirist/cartoonist for Harper's Weekly magazine, Thomas Nast, also knew the great influence of the single visual image, and magisterially used his insight and art to great effect in helping to effect social change.  One of the evils he brought down--Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall--said that he didn't fear anything that was written about him in the newspaper because his constituency "couldn't read".  But what he didn't get, and what he never did understand, that the thing that brought him down were cartoons, and those were the things that people didn't need to be able to read words in because they could already "read" the images. And it got him in the end.

The manufacturers of the NSDAP recognized this factor and saw how much it could play against them, and so sought to remove "it".  They went after the art, the artists, and the ideas, and came away from it all with safe and sanitized and partially meaningless culture. 

The artists condemned in the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition necessarily reads like a who's-who of modern and 20th century art:  the show included Ernst Barlach, Willi Baumeister, Max Beckmann, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Paul Klee, Ernst Krircherm Lyonel Feiniger, Oskar Schlemmer,  Franz Marc, El Lissitzky, Oscar Kokoschka, George Grosz, Marc Chagall, and Kurt Schwittersto name a few.  (A full list can be seen below.) Entire artistic movements were also to be eliminated in order to save the morality and conscience of the German people, including Bauhaus, Surrealism, Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism and Dada. Basically, it was almost all of modern art.

[Hitler visiting the Degenerate Art Show, 1937.)

A fuller list of those exhibited at the 1937 Degenerate Art show.

These artist were abandoned/exiled/killed in favor of a more morally-robust and Aryan flavor, a genetic correctness, like the work here by Ernst Liebermann, moribund in its deadly color, greasy, tumescent hyper-non-sexuality:

which is picture postcard bad, like Franklin Mint artists gone to Nazism and shining/lustrous nudes.

The "degenerate" label didn't last very long in Germany, at least not in years--measured in lives, however, it is a completely different story.

The Polish Threat to Germany as Seen by the Nazis, 1939

 JF Ptak Science Book--expansion of Post 230 (September 2008)

This is one of those times when a pamphlet has posed an idea that had never before occurred to me. This anonymous work produced by the German propaganda machine in May 1939 presents the incredible assertion that Poland did indeed have plans to continue to break the back of Germany over the never-to-be-forgotten Treaty of Versailles, and to also physically attack south-eastern Germany sometime in 1940.

Again, the idea that Germany was defending itself against an imminent attack by Poland was completely novel to me.  There's always a reason for these sorts of beginnings of wars (Gulf of Tonkin, WMD), but this one really is exceptionally removed.  Poland had just decided to defend its borders against the Germans following their conquest of Czechoslovakia the previous year--until then the Polish military's biggest threat was the Soviet Union.  The German attack, the blitzkrieg (Fall Weiss) which would begin on 1 September 1939 involved 1.5 million German soldiers attacking two principal points in Poland. It was ostensibly launched in response to a small Polish attack on the German border town of Gliwce.   In the attack, the Germans unleashed 11 tank divisions versus Poland's 1; sent in 1250 bombers and fighters to Poland's (mainly obsolete) 360; rolled 4 motorized divisions against Poland's, um, that's right, they didn't have any.  And of course the Germans had a modern and vastly superior navy, compared with Poland's 4 destroyers, five subs, and assorted smaller numbers of smaller and less-significant vessels. 

The British and the French issued an ultimatum to Germany to cease and desist; Hitler had no intentions in stopping, throwing the five armies of von Rundstedt and von Block deeper into the country in a fast and (according to many German generals) breakneck manner.  The British and French declared war on the 3rd, by which time the war in eastern Poland was already almost over.  The Germans did respond to the ultimatum (see this in continued reading, below) in which it outlines some of their needs and Polish-inspired dears. 

By 24 September the Germans had reached the formerly important geographic boundary of the Vistula and swarmed past.  Warsaw was bombed by some 1150 aircraft, and by the 27th, the fighting was almost entirely over. (Some divisions held out to 6 October, the invasion completed in 36 days). 

 

It is sometimes forgotten in the quickness of this defeat that Poland inflicted some heavy losses on the German military machine:  8000 soldiers killed with 27,000 wounded and 5,000 MIA; 217 tanks were destroyed.  The Luftwaffe lost over 500 planes, either entirely destroyed or damaged to the point of uselessness.  Polish losses were far greater.

It was at this time that the first of my grandmother's brothers, Raymond Dymek of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, would cross the border into Canada and volunteer, becoming a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force.  He would fly against the Nazis with the CRAF, then joined the RAF, until finally, when the U.S. joined the  European war 27 months later, would fly for the U.S. Army Air Force.  He had a very long career and made it through.  His five brothers would also enlist in the U.S. armed forces; all six brothers would return home. Fatherland and all that.   I know the vocabuarly for their response to the idea that Germany was responding to a Polish threat of invasion didn't exist to them--it barely does for me.