The Teutonic Knights

 From The Collector:

Also known as the Deutscher Orden and the Brothers of the German House of St. Mary in Jerusalem, the Teutonic Order was a key player in the medieval expansion in Eastern Europe. During the Baltic Crusades in Prussia, present-day Latvia and Estonia, and Lithuania, the Teutonic Knights virtually wiped out the pagan population living in these areas, replacing the established authorities with a theocratic state. Read on to learn more about the Teutonic Order and its role in the Christianization of Europe’s last strongholds of paganism.

In 1189, the Crusading forces led by Guy of Lusignan were besieging the town of Acre, which was then controlled by Saladin, the sultan of Egypt and Syria. In 1187, Saladin had also conquered the city of Jerusalem, leading to the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, a Crusader state established by the Crusaders in 1099 after the end of the First Crusade.

When news of the fall of Jerusalem reached Europe, Pope Gregory VIII initiated the Third Crusade to restore the city to Christian control. In 1190, during the siege of Acre, a number of German merchants, mostly from Bremen and Lübeck, decided to form a fraternity to care for the sick. A year later, after the Crusaders managed to capture Acre, the fraternity established its headquarters in a hospital in the town, and it became known as the Hospital of St. Mary of the German House in Jerusalem. (Read more.)

Share

Remembering the Battle of Mohács

A brilliant article which shows how the European powers' fears over the growth of Habsburg hegemony contributed to the triumph of Islam. From Chronicles:

Hungary’s defeat coincided with larger European developments. The Habsburgs were then emerging as a major European power, considered by many players—and most dishonorably by the French—to be more threatening than the 100,000-strong devastating Turkish host advancing up the Danube Valley. The Habsburgs were able to establish control over the westernmost fifth of Hungary, and from there, 150 years later under the leadership of their brilliant commander Eugene of Savoy, to advance steadily south to the Military Frontier established along the northern banks of the Sava and the Danube east of Belgrade. In the Hungarian heartland under Turkish rule, however, and in  autonomous Transylvania in the east,  because so many Catholic hierarchs and priests died at Mohács, the Hungarian Reformation consolidated its territorial hold.

In 1526 there was a structural imbalance between Europe’s acute political fragmentation, while the Ottomans, under Suleiman, had achieved an impressive level of administrative centralization and military efficiency. The Turkish edifice would start crumbling only decades after Suleiman’s death in 1566, but in the meantime Europe faced immense danger from the east. It loomed just as Europe engaged—during the Thirty Years’ War—in the most destructive episode of self immolation until that time. The Ottoman threat finally retreateed after the second siege of Vienna in 1683.

The battle lost in 1526 has had a defining role in forming Hungarian historical consciousness. The “Mohács Trauma” appeared in the public discourse soon after the battle, and eventually became synonymous with continuing Hungarian misfortune in the public mind. For a long time that trauma was restricted mainly to the upper social stratum. This was in contrast to Serbia and other Serb lands, where the epic saga of the Battle of Kosovo and its mystical transformation of military defeat into moral victory lived on even among illiterate peasants, indeed especially among them. (Read more.)

Share

The Hessians and the American Revolution

 I remember visiting the Hessian Barracks in Frederick, MD as a child. From Smithsonian:

On August 15, 1776, a flotilla of British ships arrived on Staten Island, New York, just south of Manhattan. On board the vessels were more than 8,600 foreign soldiers, the first major contingent of German troops to reach the American Colonies. (Another group had set up camp in Quebec several months earlier to reinforce British forces in Canada.) 

There was no mistaking the new arrivals. Unlike their British allies, who were famously known as the redcoats, the Hessians usually wore blue or green coats, sometimes accompanied by tall, pointy brass headgear called miter caps.

For more than a year, the British Army had been battling rebellious colonists intent on establishing an independent nation. In October 1775, a fed-up George III announced his intention to “put a speedy end to these disorders by the most decisive exertions.” The British king added that he had “received the most friendly offers of foreign assistance.” Despite vigorous objections from some lawmakers, Parliament backed George in taking up those offers, expecting that the added manpower would soon crush the rebellion once and for all.

The Germans apparently shared that optimism. “None of the soldiers that went to America in 1776 anticipated that the war would last more than a year or two,” writes Friederike Baer, a historian at Penn State Abington College, in her 2022 book, Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War. (Read more.)

Share

Has Hitler’s Order for the Holocaust Been Discovered?

 From It Can Always Get Worse:

To summarise briefly: why the Holocaust happened is straightforward—because Adolf Hitler wished it to—but how and when the decision was taken is debated. The debate turns largely on whether there was a Führer Order for the Holocaust. While no such document has ever been found, this is not surprising. There was extensive destruction of Nazi documentation, and Hitler routinely conveyed orders verbally anyway, so, if there was a Führer Order, it was almost certainly never written down in the first place. Accentuating the difficulties, the surviving records are written according to a euphemistic official Nazi discourse that leaves room for interpretation, and Hitler—like Lenin—deliberately cultivated uncertainty within the regime about his role in the worst crimes.1

Historians are broadly divided into two camps, those who argue for a moment between July and December 1941 when a Führer Order was issued, and those who argue there was no “moment”, but rather an iterative process between Hitler at the centre and various lower officials in the occupied territories, where the Führer endorsed, rather than originated, the escalatory steps of the Shoah.

In assessing the evidence historians are working with in coming to these divergent conclusions, one aspect I highlighted was:

SS operatives involved in implementing the Final Solution … have uniformly testified that their orders came directly from Hitler. There is no reason to doubt the SS men were substantially correct, that Hitler stood behind the fundamental decision for the Holocaust and every decision of significance as it escalated. But it does not settle the question of a Führer Order because none of the SS officials heard Hitler’s verbal instruction(s) personally; they all heard of Hitler’s will through [Heinrich] Himmler. And Himmler did not specify to his subordinates whether, during his increasingly frequent face-to-face meetings with Hitler from the summer of 1941 onwards, the Führer had approved or initiated genocidal measures. (Read more.)

 

Will there be another genocide? From Welcome to Absurdistan:

Fourteen years ago I published a book one chapter of which entirely dealt with the forests fires curently raging across Canada choking the lungs of Americans from Maine to Chicago. It was published by Harper Collins in New York, and received a good old fashioned push by their PR department.

I woke up at 4 am to get on drive time in Texas and Atlanta. I must have spoken to 30 million people - in theory - the PR kept me up on the numbers each radio host had, I spoke to the big names, including the sainted Dennis Prager which pleased HC no end. In each interview I hit the major highlight of the book - the most shocking crime against people and nature - outlining how “natural regulation” installed by the UN FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) had made the forests thick, desiccated: visualize a whole bunch of unthinned little trees leaching all the water from the soil, fire ladders growing up the trees, just waiting for a lightning strike or stupid “activist” kid to trigger conflagration.

All over the world, these policies, these regulations had been forced in a series of iniquitous meetings where entire nations were placed under the rule of weedy, stupid, vicious idiots who called themselves “scientists” employed in Turtle Bay, who had, courtesy of the Rockefellers and a bunch of other malignant families - basically the ones holding the debt of the New York Federal Reserve - crowned themselves Lords of Nature. And, as I began to understand, planned to take it all from us. (Read more.)

Share

Wedding of Marie of Edinburgh

 

The three wedding ceremonies of the future Queen of Romania. From Royal Musings:

The bridal party arrived at the Stadkirche at 4:30 p.m, for the first religious wedding, a Roman Catholic ceremony. The "picturesque church" was overflowing with guests.  Kaiser Wilhelm II, dressed as an imperial Field Marshal, entered first, escorting the bride's mother, the Duchess of Edinburgh.  They were followed by the Duke of Connaught  with the Princess of Hohenzollern, Grand Duke Alexis and the Duchess of Connaught,  Prince and Princess Leopold of Hohenzollern,  King Carol of Roumania, Crown Prince Ferdinand, and the bride and groom's brothers and sisters. Princess Marie and her father, the Duke of Edinburgh, were the last to enter the church.

The marriage was conducted by the parish priest, and the nuptial address was given by the Abbot of the Benedictine Monastery at Beuron. Crown Prince Ferdinand's "Ja" was "heard distinctly all over the church," but Princess Marie's answer was "quite inaudible to those placed at any distance from the chancel." After they had "exchanged rings and clasped hands, Prince Ferdinand and Princess Marie, "rose as man and wife to the strain of the beautiful chorale "Laus tibi Domine." (Read more.)

Share

I Think I Am Finally Beginning to Understand the Thirty Years War

 From Gruntled History Teacher:

Before the war, Germany was one of the richest and most developed regions of Europe, with an extraordinary medieval network of towns and trade networks that had grown up throughout the Middle Ages, and a convoluted constitutional system that defies explanation (then or now), but which actually worked better than is generally credited. But the Thirty Years War devastated large parts of the country so badly that, in German cultural memory, the 17th century is nearly as dark as the 20th.

It’s the war that tore Germany apart, and laid the seeds for later German national history, with all its accompanying baggage. But it also played a pivotal role in the nationalist histories of Germany, France, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands. For the Enlightenment, it was the war that delegitimized Christendom and allowed science and reason to supplant religion. American religious freedom, pluralism, and toleration, have long been contrasted with the devastation of Europe’s wars of religion.

For military historians, the Thirty Years War has been the war that crystallized the military revolution and the rise of the fiscal-military state. International Relations theorists still describe the modern world as Westphalian, referring to the Peace of Westphalia that ended the war and established a system of sovereign states as the default international order. Catholic and Protestant historiographies naturally championed their respective sides, and all the major figures of the war have long been cast as heroes or villains according to whoever held the pen. The history of the Thirty Years War has been fought over and contested almost as much as the war itself. (Read more.)

Share

Is God Using Communism to Punish Us?

 From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

 In his 1948 book Communism and the Conscience of the West, Bishop Fulton Sheen argues that Christianity and communism have similar world views. Christianity contains the truth about our lives, teaching us that love of God and neighbor, respecting the natural law, and the anticipation that we will have to battle real evil in this world. It is bluntly realistic. Communism is a distortion of Christianity. It makes the individual, in Sheen’s phrase, “a robot,” a slave to unstoppable historical and economic forces, which will result in utopia - if only after a lot of violence.

     Yet both Christianity and Communism see the world as the spiritual battleground that it is. Sheen respects Communism more than he does liberalism, which seeks comfort and virtue without any real battle.“Thought utopian and violent,” Sheen wrote, “Marxism reveals a better insight into the historical process than liberalism, which saw peace coming without a struggle and which denied that even a relative Easter of economic order would come without the Good Friday of self-sacrifice and effort.”

 Sheen goes on to argue that “the Gospel for the last Sunday of Pentecost and the Gospel for the first Sunday of Advent are gospels of catastrophe, they proclaim that the final era of peace will not be ushered in until the final conflict between good and evil, when God shall come to judge the living and the dead and the new city of Peace will be descending from the heavens.”

    Sheen also points out that the Russians learned Marxism from German intellectuals:

As many a parent who educated his child in an extremely progressive school, where the child equated freedom with doing what he pleased, is now the parent who wants to know what to do with his recalcitrant, alcoholic, neurotic son, so the Western world that taught Russia some bad ideas may soon want to know how it can be saved from a country which learned is lesson all too well. A Freudian psychoanalyst cannot help the son, so neither politics nor economics can help the Western world, for the fault is deeper; the world is under the judgment of God and needs repentance.    

    Sheen writes that “though Babylon fell because it was very wicked, it was nonetheless God’s instrument for disciplining the people of Judah. Assyria was bestial, but to was the ‘rod and staff’ of God’s anger against the people of Israel.” In the West, “communism may be the instrument for the liquidation of a bourgeois civilization that has forgotten God.” (Read more.)

Share

How the Thirty Years’ War Ravaged Europe

 From The Collector:

The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history. What began as a religious struggle in the Holy Roman Empire soon expanded into a continent-wide power struggle involving nearly every major state. Entire regions were depopulated, armies grew to unprecedented size, and the war changed how Europe understood sovereignty and statehood. By the time peace finally arrived in 1648, the war had not only shattered old medieval structures but helped lay the foundations of the modern nation-state.

The Holy Roman Empire in the early seventeenth century was a fragmented and decentralized political entity, composed of hundreds of independent kingdoms, principalities, bishoprics, free cities, and minor lordships. While these territories owed nominal loyalty to the Emperor, real power rested with local rulers, many of whom guarded their autonomy jealously.

This loose structure had endured for centuries, but it was placed under immense strain by the religious divisions unleashed by the Reformation. By 1600, the empire was split between Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist states. Although the Peace of Augsburg (1555) had attempted to stabilize relations by allowing rulers to choose between Catholicism and Lutheranism, it excluded Calvinists and failed to resolve underlying tensions.

Religious identity became closely tied to political authority, with rulers using confessional allegiance to assert independence from imperial control. The Habsburg emperors were staunch Catholics and increasingly sought to reverse Protestant gains and strengthen central authority within the empire.

These pressures erupted in Bohemia in 1618. Protestant nobles, alarmed by perceived Habsburg encroachments on their religious and political rights, threw imperial officials out of a castle window in Prague, in the Defenestration of Prague. The initial rebellion was against Habsburg rule rather than a purely religious uprising. Although framed in confessional terms, the conflict centred on resistance to imperial centralization. (Read more.)

Share

How the Fall of Rome Created the Power of the Medieval Papacy

 From The Collector:

In the Early Middle Ages, after the fall of the Roman Empire left the existing government structures in shambles, the papacy established itself as the preeminent authority in the West. Indeed, in a post-Roman world, where there was no large political structure to ensure stability in Europe, the Roman Church emerged as the only force able to provide some unity. Led by a series of popes functioning as both spiritual and temporal rulers, the papacy came to dominate the intellectual life, political landscape, and culture of the so-called Dark Ages.

In 476, the German chief Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, ending the succession of Roman emperors inaugurated by Augustus. He then proclaimed himself king. The event is traditionally considered the end of the Roman Empire. By then, the so-called “barbarian invasions,” or the migration of Germanic peoples into Roman-controlled Europe, had already significantly altered the social and political composition of the empire.

In 406, the Vandals, Suebi, Alani, Burgundians, and Alemanni, fleeing from the advance of the Huns, crossed the River Rhine, pouring into Gaul. Some years later, they arrived in Spain. Meanwhile, the Visigoths established themselves in Narbonensis and Aquitania (the territories in Gaul). Though partially successful in regaining control of portions of Gaul, Roman general Constantius was unable to expel the “barbarians” from the country.

In 410, Alaric, at the head of the Visigoths, sacked Rome, pillaging the heart of the Roman Empire for three days. Only the churches were spared, as Alaric had converted to Christian Arianism. In the first half of the 5th century, other Germanic peoples began to establish themselves in the Roman territories. In 435, the Vandals conquered Carthage in North Africa. In 450, Attila and his Huns invaded Italy. Only Pope Leo the Great managed to persuade them not to sack Rome. (Read more.)

Share

Chinoiserie in Architecture

 

From The Collector:

Located in the Sanssouci Park, the Chinesisches Haus (“Chinese House”) in Potsdam, Germany, was built between 1755 and 1764. Commissioned by Prussian king Frederick the Great, the project was headed by German master builder Johann Gottfried Büring. The Chinese House is characterized by its trefoil shape, which was inspired by the Maison du Trèfle at the Palace of Lunéville in Lorraine. Its exteriors feature four prominent gilded sandstone columns alongside several playful, life-sized gilded sculptures of Chinese musicians and tea drinkers. These were the works of German sculptors Johann Melchior Kambly, Johann Gottlieb Heymüller, and Johann Peter Benckert.

The Chinoiserie style continues in the building’s interiors with a vast collection of 18th-century porcelain and a large fresco depicting a whimsical gathering. It features numerous Chinese men standing behind a balustrade, some glancing around and others engaged in conversation. In the surroundings, there are peacocks, parrots, monkeys, statues of Buddha, and many other Chinoiserie motifs. Frederick the Great, as a fervent admirer of Chinoiserie, would later follow up with two additional Chinese-style structures. One was the Chinese Kitchen, located just a stone’s throw from the Chinese House, and the other was the Drachenhaus (“Dragon House”), located at the northern part of the Sanssouci Park. (Read more.)

Share

The Second Partition of Poland

 From Charles Coulombe:

THE First Partition of Poland was a dreadful blow, not just to Polish morale, but that of the Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians with whom they shared the Commonwealth. The Allied Powers — Russia, Prussia, and Austria — that had undertaken the First Partition were watchful over any signs of independence that the Polish King and government might exert. Russia in particular supervised both the meeting of the Sejm and the Permanent Council made up of pro-Russian nobles and now deputed to carry on most of the business of governing. Stanislaus’ royal prerogative was restricted, so that he lost the right to confer noble titles, and military promotions and to appoint ministers and senators. Provincial Governorships, and Crown lands would be auctioned off. With the King reduced to seeming impotence, and the government firmly in pro-Russian hands, it seemed that the Commonwealth was now a complete puppet.

But King Stanislaus was a wily man. There was strong Conservative opposition to the Council, made up of nobility who feared loss of their own powers to a resurgent central government. The King became adept at playing the two sides off against each other and creating his own King’s party. Moreover, although his own powers had been severely clipped, his ability to influence and cajole became if anything ever stronger. He became very adept at mitigating or frustrating the worst of legislation that the Russians favoured. In secret, with trusted advisers, he created a reform programme. But while the King was able to slow the rate of decay, his opponents in the Sejm were able to block his reforms.

This standoff would continue for almost two decades. But on the wider world, things were happening. In 1781, Austria and Russia allied as a means of countering — and, they hoped, eventually conquering — the Ottomans (Catherine the Great had one of her grandsons named Constantine, in hopes that he would reign over a new Byzantine Empire). Stanislaus attempted to join this alliance, reasoning that it would strengthen Poland-Lithuania, and buy the country some independence. They were unable to agree on terms, but in 1787, the two Christian Empires went to war with the Muslim one. In response, Stanislaus convoked the “Great Sejm” the following year, which would sit for four years. Then in 1789, the revolution in France began, and that country created a constitution. (Read more.)

Share

The Rot That Bred the Reich

 From Celina's Substack:

To understand the death of a civilisation, one must first walk through its ruins. The scene is Berlin, sometime in the mid-1920s, beneath the blinding, electric glare of neon and the suffocating, narcotic haze of the Berliner Luft, an atmosphere that locals gleefully described as an amphetamine-like air that made hearts race, pupils dilate, and morals evaporate until dawn.1 In the shadowed, labyrinthine alleys of a shattered empire, the streets of the capital have been entirely surrendered to a bacchanalia of unprecedented depravity. Prostitutes in various stages of undress crowd the cobblestones. They are openly aggressive, their ranks swollen by pregnant mothers, desperate war widows, and adolescents, all selling their flesh for the price of a meal.2 On every street corner, hawkers peddle cocaine, morphine, and opium to passersby, while newsstands prominently display nudist magazines dedicated exclusively to the exhibition of children.3

Push past the heavy, smoke-stained velvet curtains of the subterranean cabarets, and the full, suffocating scope of the abyss reveals itself. Here, glittering shows parade acres of sweaty, perfumed flesh to the applause of an audience intoxicated by a potent mixture of ecstasy, terror, and moral decay. Cross-dressing men perform grotesque pantomimes of traditional womanhood, while tuxedo-clad women mock the remnants of patriarchal authority, puffing cigars and sneering at the ghosts of their fathers.

For the modern, liberal apologists of the era, this explosion of libertinism is often retroactively celebrated as a vibrant, avant-garde renaissance, a brief, shining moment of progressive emancipation before the darkness of fascism fell. It is romanticised in our modern cinema and theatre as a glorious rebellion against the stuffy confines of tradition. But to the ordinary, rooted citizens of the German nation, the truth was far darker and far more evident. (Read more.)

Share

Germany’s Protestant Church and the Seeds of a Religious Backlash

 From The European Conservative:

Germany is not like America. There is no mass evangelical movement blending Christianity with culture war activism, no figure comparable to Charlie Kirk. But this doesn’t mean the country is immune to change. Beneath the surface, a new, quieter religious backlash is stirring—and Germany’s notoriously progressivist Protestant Church may, paradoxically, be helping to fuel it.

The official church is in crisis. The scale of that crisis was thrown into sharp relief once again during this year’s Lenten season, when statistics published in March confirmed the continuing downward trend in membership. In 2025, a further 1.1 million people left the two major churches, with Protestants leading the exodus: their numbers fell by around 580,000 to approximately 17.4 million. Where in 1992, some 36% of Germans were Protestant, that figure has now fallen to 21%.

No one was surprised. The reasons are surely complex in a largely secular society. What is striking, however, is not the decline itself but the leadership’s response to it—a posture of resignation bordering on indifference. When the already-falling figures were presented in 2024, Kirsten Fehrs, chair of the German Protestant Church Council and the institution’s most senior representative, could offer nothing more than, “We will become a smaller and poorer church.”

Rather than campaign to win members, the leadership appears to have made peace with its growing irrelevance. In recent years, anything associated with the church’s former core mission—spreading the faith and engaging non-believers—has been quietly abandoned, even treated with embarrassment. The very word ‘mission’ has become contested. In a recent opinion piece, the editor of the church newspaper evangelisch.de argued that the term rests on a false distinction between “us” and “them,” and that mission should mean only “walking alongside others”—explicitly not “about recruiting members or church growth.” The instruction in John 20:21—”As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you”—is evidently no longer something the leadership feels obliged to follow. (Read more.)

Share

The Suicide of Neanderthals

 From EL PAÍS:

In his latest book, the paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak recounts how, as a young man, he spent his time observing people as he played the bagpipes in a kilt on the dirty streets of Marseille. Driven by an unconscious impulse, he had decided to master the instrument, and he succeeded, even leading a famous band in France. Then his first child was born, he found himself traveling from gig to gig, and eventually, he gave it up. But he was able to earn his PhD with the money he made from music.

The French scientist has been able to spend the last 30 years observing and studying one of the most decisive moments in the history of evolution: the encounter between our species and the Neanderthals, our closest human relatives. One of his latest discoveries is Thorin, a Neanderthal who lived around 42,000 years ago, very close to the moment of extinction. From then on, Homo sapiens became the only human species on the planet.

 In his new book The Last Neanderthal: Understanding How Humans Die, Slimak, 52, reflects on the reasons for the disappearance of these human cousins, and what it reveals about ourselves. “It’s a sad book,” he underscores, because despite the latest evidence that Neanderthals controlled fire, created cave art, and had sex and children with our own species — leaving a trace of their DNA in our genome — this scientist from the French National Center for Scientific Research believes they went extinct in isolation and abandonment. Slimak answers EL PAÍS’ questions via videoconference from his beautiful home, where he lives with his wife and two children, halfway between Toulouse and the Pyrenees. (Read more.)

40,000-year-old Stone Age symbols may have paved the way for writing, long before Mesopotamia. From Phys.org:

Over 40,000 years ago, our early ancestors were already carving signs into tools and sculptures. According to a new analysis by linguist Christian Bentz at Saarland University and archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz at the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte (Museum of Prehistory and Early History) in Berlin, these sign sequences have the same level of complexity and information density as the earliest proto-cuneiform script that emerged tens of thousands of years later, around 3,000 B.C.E.

Using a computational approach, the team examined over 3,000 signs found on 260 objects to reveal insights into the origins of writing. Their findings, which have been published in the journal PNAS, were clear—and surprised even the researchers.

Paleolithic objects dating back between 34,000 and 45,000 years bear mysterious sign sequences—often repeated lines, notches, dots and crosses. Many of these artifacts were discovered in caves in the Swabian Jura, such as a small mammoth found in the Vogelherd Cave in Lone Valley in southwestern Germany.

A Stone Age human carved the mammoth figurine out of a mammoth tusk and carefully engraved it with rows of crosses and dots. Other artifacts found in the Swabian Jura are also etched with signs. (Read more.)

Share

Marco and Munich

 From Tierney's Real News:

Marco Rubio just gave a keynote address at the 62nd Munich Security Conference in Europe, the premier global forum for international security policy.

His speech is one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard against Godless Communism - and it succinctly explains the nightmare and foolishness of Europe (and America) abandoning God and national sovereignty to appease the atheist one-world-order Globalists - in 20 minutes.

If you only listen to one thing this weekend - let it be this. In fact, I think this speech is so powerful of an explanation that it should be played in every Christian church in America on Sunday morning. I’m not kidding.

Rubio said that Europe and U.S. belong together bound by “centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry” and that since WW2 mistakes have been made:

• Outsourcing “our sovereignty to international institutions”

• Imposing energy policies that impoverish our people “to appease a climate cult”

• Opening doors to mass migration “that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.”

Rubio says “We owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward to rebuild.”

Some highlights:

MARCO RUBIO: “We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline!

We are prepared to do this alone but it is our preference, and our hope, to do this together with you, our friends in Europe.

America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before. The men who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories, the traditions, and the Christian faith of our ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.

We are part of one civilization, Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have now fallen heir.

And if at times we disagree, our disagreements come from our profound sense of concern about a Europe with which we are connected, not just economically, not just militarily. We are connected spiritually and we are connected culturally. We want Europe to be strong. We believe that Europe and the West must survive.” (Read more.)

Share

The Triumph of German Industrial Modernism

 From The Palladium Newsletter:

Germany entered the twentieth century as an industrial giant but a cultural latecomer. Its artistic inheritance remained rooted in regional craftsmanship and medieval revivalism. Albeit beautiful in isolation, these traditions offered little guidance for a rapidly growing nation competing with the disciplined cultural machines of France and England. Germany produced enormous quantities of goods, yet lacked the institutions needed to give them a coherent visual or moral character. In the hierarchy of European taste, France still dominated luxury and refinement, while England retained prestige in craftsmanship and the decorative arts. German manufacturers, in contrast, filled markets with imitative ornaments and sentimental novelties. Public taste deteriorated. Reformers feared that industrialization had eroded the very ability to judge quality, creating a visual environment disconnected from any shared cultural purpose.

The German architect and author Hermann Muthesius diagnosed the crisis with clarity: German manufacturers, he argued, had abandoned their cultural responsibilities. Cheap, derivative goods did more than weaken taste. They threatened “the national character through pollution of the visual environment.”^] Germany could not rely on imported styles, nor accept a reputation for shoddy production. A new domestic standard was required—one rooted in simplicity, integrity, and an honest expression of industrial reality.

The Werkbund emerged as the institutional answer. Its founders rejected the nostalgic escape into handicraft promoted by the English Arts and Crafts movement. They embraced the machine as a cultural fact. Modern life would not be redeemed by retreat, but by disciplined cooperation between artists and industry. Mechanization could produce beauty, but only if aesthetic judgment shaped its direction.

Central to this project was education. The Werkbund believed that a modern society needed perceptual training as urgently as technical skill. Reformers like Muthesius and Georg Kerschensteiner pushed to overhaul the school system, arguing that aesthetic judgment could not be left to habit or chance. Muthesius had already modernized the Prussian Arts and Crafts Schools, insisting that “art is an indispensable complement to life.” Kerschensteiner championed manual training as a foundation of ethical and civic development. Educators such as Ludwig Pallat, Hermann Obrist, and Franz Cizek used the Werkbund to promote methods that would “stimulate the creativity of the child, preserve his innate imaginative powers, train his eye and hand as well as his brain, and inculcate respect for manual skill.” Their goal was not simply to produce designers, but to produce citizens capable of sustaining a higher national culture. Taste itself was civic infrastructure. (Read more.)

Share

Jacques-Louis David's Sketchbook

 From ArtNet:

The French media outlet Radio France launched its investigation into the sketchbook after being contacted by a descendant of the original owner. The broadcaster claims that it was able to pull together enough evidence to back the descendant’s claim in “just a few weeks.” The discovery sheds a light on the slow progress of ongoing provenance research into objects that were acquired by French museums after 1933.

France’s ministry of culture issued a response to the evidence gathered by Radio France stating that neither the ministry nor the Palace of Versailles had not been aware that the item was stolen during the war. They promised to “continue their research on this notebook and have discussions with the descendants of the owners.”

The Palace of Versailles declined to comment.

The sketchbook dates from 1790 and is filled with rare drawings and notes, including preparatory materials for one of David’s most famous works, The Tennis Court Oath (1790). The painting, which was never finished, records a foundational event in the French Revolution. It belongs to the Palace of Versailles but is currently on display in the Louvre’s landmark exhibition “Jacques-Louis David,” until January 26. The sketchbook is not featured in the exhibition.

Once stolen by the Nazis, the sketchbook was sent to Germany. It was sold by Munich’s Karl and Faber gallery in 1943. It came into the hands of the German dealer and art historian Otto Wertheimer, who had himself fled Nazi persecution of the Jews in the 1930s. He settled in Paris in 1944 and became known for supplying French museums with important masterpieces at a time when an artwork’s provenance was rarely questioned. He sold the David sketchbook to the Palace of Versailles in 1951. (Read more.)

Share

Health of Empress Alexandra

 

 

From Nicholas II:

During her life, Alexandra carried much grief, worry and sorrow on her shoulders, all of which began at an early age. She lost her brother Friedrich to haemophilia in May 1873; her sister Marie died of diphtheria in November 1878; and the following month, her beloved mother Princess Alice also died of diphtheria in December 1878.

After her mother and sister’s deaths, Alix became more reserved and withdrawn. She described her childhood before her mother and sister’s death as “unclouded, happy babyhood, of perpetual sunshine, then of a great cloud.”

In March 1892, her father Grand Duke Louis IV, died of a heart attack. According to Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, Alix regarded the death of her father as perhaps “the greatest sorrow of her life”. Buxhoeveden recalled in her 1928 biography [The Life and Tragedy of Alexandra Feodorovna] that “for years she could not speak of him, and long after when she was in Russia, anything that reminded her of him would bring her to the verge of tears”. This loss was probably so much greater for Alix because Grand Duke Louis IV had been Alix’s only remaining parent since she was six years of age. (Read more.)

Share

A Warning to the West

 From Diane Montagna:

Europe is undergoing a process of intentional self-annihilation. Its political leaders have sealed the continent’s fate through unchecked mass migration, deliberately choosing to replace the coming generations with Muslims. The Church has aided them in this endeavor with talk of “mercy” towards refugees, while justice for Europeans has been sidelined. And perhaps the bell would not have tolled with such finality, had Europe held fast to its ancient faith. Yet in religion’s stead, each person determines his own morality and subjective truth. Christianity is viewed as superfluous to true ethics and human rights.

One might even argue that the European elite—in politics, media, and beyond—are relentlessly pressing and manipulating the population toward surrender, even self-erasure, thereby igniting the fierce counterfire of a surging populism they themselves provoked. They must explain the reason for such folly. A German economist once remarked on former Chancellor Merkel’s inexplicably destructive migration policies: “Either she has lost her mind, or she pursues some hidden agenda unknown to us.” This is compounded by the tendency of the so-called elite to converse chiefly among their own kind, insulated from the concerns and reflections of ordinary citizens—a detachment that serves to bolster their one-sided dominance.

Wolfgang Kubicki, the former liberal vice president of the German Bundestag, who authored the book Meinungsunfreiheit (Unfreedom of Opinion), observed that whereas people once exchanged arguments to find the truth, they now discredit the people who make arguments so that no one has to address the arguments themselves. This tactic was rightly condemned by US Vice President J.D. Vance in his memorable address in Europe. And this was precisely the point of President Trump’s recent warning: Look at Germany, see what they have done there, and know what awaits us should we fail to alter course — irrespective of whether one agrees with every step he has taken. (Read more.)

Share

The Man Behind 'The Nutcracker'

 From The Conversation:

So how does The Nutcracker and the Mouse King fit into this strange body of work?

Hoffmann’s original tale is no innocent sugarcoated fantasy. The story was written for his friend Hitzig’s children, Marie and Fritz. It is a veiled critique of the strictures Hitzig and his social class placed on his children’s freedom.

The story is, tellingly, set in a household named Stahlbaum, or “Steel Tree”: a fortress of sorts that is infiltrated by the mysterious Drosselmeier. 

In Hoffmann’s tale, Marie is positioned as the novice who must learn to use and trust her imagination. Only her imaginative vision can animate – literally and metaphysically – the mundane world that surrounds her and fulfil her dreams and desires. Drosselmeier is a figure analogous to Hoffmann, cultivating Marie Hitzig’s imagination within and outside of the story.

This clashing of worlds is not without its trauma. Hoffmann’s story ends on a sombre note, with Marie’s visions being dismissed by her family as nonsense. Mocked into outward submission, she never speaks of these adventures again. Ridiculed as a dreamer, she becomes reserved. But in her mind’s eye, she returns from time to time to “those glorious days”.

Hoffmann’s ending leaves us suspended between sadness at the suppression of Marie’s childhood imagination and triumph at the quiet persistence of her imaginative spirit. (Read more.)

Share