MORE ABOUT BISMARCK...


JULY 9:

Bismarck deserves to be discussed over two days, I believe.

He was – like Churchill – eminent at producing one-liners, which were remembered many years afterwards.  Here are a few of them:

Laws are like sausages. It is better not to know how they are made!

It is more important to make history than to write about it.

When history passes through your room you’d better do what you can to pinch its coattails.

There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.

If you want to cheat the world, tell the truth.

Never believe anything in politics, before it has been officially denied.

Interesting to reflect upon these Bismarck sentences.

I mentioned yesterday that a 7 meter high statue of Bismarck was erected in the then German South Jutland in 1901. And that this statue can now be seen a bit hidden in the Hüttener Nationalpark north of Rendsburg.  I can today show you a picture of this statue as it looks today. See below.

And at the end a small story from Aumühle near Hamburg, where Bismarck after 1871 lived at the castle Friedrichsruh.   It was built in the 18th century by Frederick von Lippe as his castle for hunting in the Sachsenhausen forests.  It is in the region of Lauenburg, which was Danish from 1814-64.  It was given to the Danish king Frederik VI in 1814 to comfort him a bit, as he after the Napoleonic wars ( when Denmark was on Napoleon’s side ) had to give away Norway.
The castle of Friedrichsruh was, by the way, the headquarters for the Swedish White Busses, which picked up Danish prisoners in the German concentration camps towards the end of World War II.   The castle is today still owned by the Bismarck family.

Bismarck himself is buried in Aumühle. I want to tell a small event linked to that. My wife’s German aunt lived in Aumühle. Her husband was a professor in theology. And the priest in Aumühle now and then asked him to preach in the church at special occasions. Once he returned from one of the services he said to his wife:  This morning I was preaching to the Trinity.  Above me was the Lord, below me in the crypt Bismarck. And in front of me sat the last leader of the Nazi government, admiral Karl Dönitz.

He lived in Aumühle until his death in 1980. Before that he had served ten years in the Spandau prison in Berlin after he was convicted a war criminal by the war criminals court in Nuremberg in 1946.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AMERICA IS COMING BACK TO THE WORLD !

Image
NOVEMBER 24: This is the day! The day when president Trump finally three weeks after the American elections de facto accepts that Joe Biden has won the elections.   And won by a big margin.   So, now US is coming back to the world.   The nominations president-elect Biden is doing shows that he is choosing experienced and professional people, who know what they will be responsible for.   This is also great news for Europe.    The European-American relations will now come back on the track – as real allies, not as sort of adversaries, as Trump preferred to see them.   EU president Charles Michel yesterday congratulated Biden with his victory and invited him to a summit meeting with EU in Brussels next year, after he has taken over in January. The EU with its 448 mio. inhabitants and the US with 328 mio. have a lot in common.   Their mutual trade is huge. In 2019 it was 720 billion dollars – which is about one third of all international trade. ...
Read more

CORONA SITUATION - AND A FEW PIECES OF ADVICE

Hello on this day - March 5 .  I will once again make comments about the Corona situation - incl. some good pieces of advice I have picked up. See below. I also enclose information linked to this day. And MY WARMEST CONGRATULATIONS to those of you celebrating your birthday or some other happy event today.  Have a wonderful day! I want once again to write an update on the CORONA situation – or COVID-19, as it is also called. It takes up a lot of space in the media – and sometimes also in the real world – for the time being. I want to remind you of the facts I gave in an earlier comment:  WHO , the UN World Health Organisation, informs us that the average number of deaths in the world from the “normal” flu every year is 660.000,  55.000 people per month. And I haven’t seen any figure for how many people are infected by the flu. It is most likely millions of people every year. I also in undramatic terms want to say that I have never seen any similar ...
Read more

SHIP ELEVATORS IN BELGIUM

I have earlier written about Belgian culture. Today I want to tell you about Belgium’s INDUSTRIAL CULTURE.   In the beginning of the 19 th century the southern part of Belgium, Wallonia, was the most industrialised part of Europe – apart from England. It was based upon coal mines, iron and steelworks and a big network of internal waterways for transport.   East of Mons you can f.ex. see a former huge industrial complex, which today is an art museum.   The owners in 1810 built a lot of houses for their workers around the factory.   These houses are still there. The place is called GRAND HORNU. A very special side of the Walloon industrial culture was and are the so-called SHIP ELEVATORS.   They are huge elevators, which can lift ships up and down from different heights of the canals in the area. The first one in Houdeng-Goegnies was build in 1888. It can lift ships 15 meters up and down. Three more were added in 1917. Each of them can lift 17 meters. ...
Read more