Oxford, Paris, and other things

 As I'm still trying to remember and make progress in German, I'm watching a lot of ARTE programmes . (I just searched for ARTE in my ROKU device and it appeared! It's not however the live television programme that you get in France or Germany) and I watched the documentary "Stockholm 1975 terror at the embassy" about an assault made by the  RAF (Red Army Faction) on the West German embassy . They took embassy staff hostage and asked for the liberation of all RAF members. I was 6 years old then but I do remember my mum speaking about 'la bande à Baader'. Terrible events, terrible violence. Two embassy staff murdered and two terrorists blown by their own explosives. One remained alive, Karl-Heinz Dellwo, served his time I suppose, and is now in charge of an art gallery in Hamburg. How strange.   But Karl-Heinz Dellwo puts the blame on having been raised in a nazi environment, that West Germany, after the war, did not do enough to purge itself from its nazi ...

 This is my second part of my (brief) reflection on Germany after my travel there (Rheine and Hamburg). It's called 'de l'Allemagne' after Madame de Staël's book. I have always wondered about the difference between a state and its limits and the official language of that state, during conversations made with complete strangers in trains or other places, I've discovered there are Swedish speaking communities in Norway and Finland - not to mention the USA, Hungarian speaking communities in Slovakia and Serbia, Russian speakers in Ukraine and Belarus (and of course Paris!), and so many others. But the one European speaking community that I have found a bit everywhere is... the German speaking one. They are, or they were, everywhere: Belgium, France, Russia, Ukraine, most other countries in East Europe. Some were invited by countries, some invited themselves. This is well explained in MacGregor's Germany: memory of a nation (chapter 3: lost capitals) Walking in ...

 No no don't worry I'm not going to redo a madame de Staël, a noble (well as far as I know) lady from France who wrote books at the beginning of the 19th century and is remembered mostly for her book de l'Allemagne.                                                               Bismark monument, Hamburg   (with panels explaning its history and controversy) I vaguely remember her from my highschool as she was included in the Lagarde et Michard , the annual textbook for French literature and culture. Each year was a new century and we started with medieval time when we were in first year so I believe XIX century arrived when I was a teenager. I vaguely remember, from the year before, the walking into nature of monsieur Rousseau, the spleen from the North (England? Scotland?) and the Sturm und Drang...

je commence à lire un nouveau livre sur l'histoire de la Russie vue d'un angle culturel: Natasha's dance: a cultural history of Russia très intéressant, je ne savais pas par exemple le rôle joué par les serfs dans la vie culturelle, je pensais que tous les serfs étaient des paysans, mais pas du tout, il y avait par exemple des orchestres entiers, des chanteurs, des architectes aussi. Intéressant aussi la contruction de Saint Pétersbourg, par la suite traitée en ville-phantôme. Il faut que je relise les nouvelles de Pétersbourg de Gogol ! Je me suis promenée à Saint Pétersbourg ce soir, j'ai acheté un nouveau jeu PGR 4 project gotham racing, il y a plusieurs circuits dans la ville , évidemment j'ai beaucoup d'accidents car je passe mon temps à regarder les immeubles!

j'ai enfin retrouvé mon mot de passe pour Librarything donc j'ai pu mettre la collection russe de ma bibliothèque dessus

Just bought a book (3 for 2 at Waterstone's but Blackwells is also doing the same in Oxford) and got three books Anna Politkovskaya's Putin's Russia , Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag archipelago 1918-56 and the one I have started reading now Russia and the Russians by Geoffrey Hosking, it will help me understand the country a little bit more. Liked for example (p. 4-5) "The Russian Empire has been permanently situated between two or, arguably, three ecumenes. In its administrative structures it has been an Asian empire, building upon or adapting the practices of China and the ancient steppe empires. In its culture it has been European for at least three centuries, borrowing heavily from both Protestant and Catholic countries. In its religion it is Byzantine, derived from an East Roman or Greek Christian ecumene which no longer has a separate existence with its own heartland, but which has left enduring marks on the landscape of Europe. (...) for example Ivan I...