Story of the Stone (Dream of the Red Chamber) by Cao Xueqin (see earlier entry) – a novel which takes the reader into a closely described 18th-century Chinese family, tells the stories of dozens of main characters and a few hundred minor ones, with many sad stories of the girls (both the maids and the members of the family, who all had to be married off), and the whole thing wrapped in a Buddhist framework that casts a different light on all the stories in retrospect. Dore J. Levy, in Ideal and Actual in ‘The Story of the Stone’, says that to appreciate the novel’s position in Chinese culture, we must imagine a work with the critical cachet of James Joyce’s Ulysses and the popular appeal of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and twice as long as the two combined.

Also Thomas Bernhard, particularly the autobiography in five short volumes: Die Ursache, Der Keller, Der Atem, Die Kälte, Ein Kind. There is a collected volume, but these books could probably be picked up secondhand nowadays, for example from www.abebooks.de. Here’s a blurb from Publishers Weekly on the English edition:

Born out of wedlock, of a father whose name he was forbidden to mention and a mother who considered him “worthless,” Bernhard spent his early life in a state of torment made bearable only by his musical studies and the love of his grandfather, a failed writer and social outcast. From a Nazi boarding school, he went to a Catholic grammar school which was scarcely less oppressive. At 15 he made the liberating decision to work in a grocer’s shop catering to destitutes; but in his 19th year he contracted pneumonia, then tuberculosis, and his grandfather and mother died in quick succession.

I remember the scenes from the tuberculosis hospital, where Bernhard could see the new graves under his window.

Both books, despite the subjects, have plenty of humour.

I’m sure I could find many more. And that’s just novels. But the meme doesn’t say ‘novels’.

At the moment I am being targeted by comment spammers. They have only spammed the older entries, where comments have to be approved. None of their comments has any relevance to the post and they all link to different websites, which I’m not convinced are really websites. All the addresses are @smr.edu.pl, but the beginning of the address varies. Does this mean they are not actually from Poland? I have a feeling there is no point in writing to the Polish webmaster to complain. I just have to keep deleting them.

I know it’s Sunday, but I’d like to plug a law book. Before I came to Germany, when I was first encountering German law, I picked up two volumes of this at Wildy’s , 2nd edition, 1968 and 1971, for £5 and £6, which was a bargain at the time (about 1980).

E.J. Cohn was a German who was a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn. His book goes through the German Civil Code of the time, explaining it in English for English lawyers. There is a German index as well as an English one, and in the first volume a copy from the German Land Register (Grundbuch) and a bibliography. The second volume deals with commercial law, but also conflict of laws, civil procedure, banktuptcy, nationality and family law of East Germany. I must admit I’ve mainly used the first book. But now looking at the page describing the Prokurist and the beginning of nationality (the law of nationality has changed somewhat now), both compared with the situation in England and Wales in a clear way, I can confirm that the book is still useful today – not as a guide to current German law, but as a comparative introduction to German law, which it places in its historical context.

Unfortunately I haven’t found extracts online. There are articles about the book, but none accessible without payment. Here’s the abstract of an article about German lawyers uprooted:

Ernst Joseph Cohn was born in Breslau, Germany on August 7, 1904 to Max Cohn and Charlotte Ruß. Before taking up his studies at the law faculty of the University of Leipzig in Germany, he attended the primary and secondary schools of his home town. His doctoral thesis deals with problems of communication of declarations of intention through the medium of messengers, in particular with the legal effect of a declaration received by a messenger. He obtained his doctorate degree as a summa cum laude. This chapter chronicles Cohn’s legal education and academic career in Germany, his legal research and publications before leaving Germany and emigrating to England, his research on English law as well as international law and comparative law, his interest in civil procedure and arbitration, and his views on private international law and unification of law.

However, you can get the book second-hand online. A search at abebooks.de or abebooks.com will produce some copies. If you leave out the author’s name, you will also find an earlier Foreign Office Manual of German Law (1952) which was written by Cohn.

Note also the latter’s page on bookshop cats.

Here’s a brief extract (section 80 of Volume 1), which I hope shows what a good writer Cohn was:

The importance of legal writings by private writers is far greater in the law of the Federal Republic of Germany than it is in the common law countries. Such writings may be freely quoted in a court of law. Writers of repute enjoy a considerable persuasive authority. If the majority of writers have agreed on a certain view and a dominant view (herrschende Meinung) has thus been formed, the weight of this view in legal practice is great. As judgments of the courts have no binding effect, an attorney who can rely on the dominant opinion as expressed by the standard textbooks and commentaries will be entitled to feel confidence in his case, even though there may be one or two published judgments of inferior courts. Judgments of the courts at all levels often contain references to private writings and sometimes an extensive discussion of the points made by them, in particular where the court wishes to deviate from the views adopted by the writers. References to legal literature will be found throughout this book, although for reasons of space these have been kept to a minimum.

At last I have discovered what these people who annoy me at the swimming baths are doing. It’s an old-fashioned German swimming stroke. The person swims backwards, moving both arms up, back and forward again simultaneously, in a crablike manner, and taking up an inordinate space in the pool – almost as bad as two women chatting to each other.

The clue was given by a commenter to an entry (in German) by Kaltmamsell. Kaltmamsell swims a lot and I have often envied her fitness and indeed youth, not that I could swim that far when I was younger. She wrote this entry on the problem of large numbers of people in the Olympiabad in Munich. In the smaller pools I go to, it is not so much the young swimmers but the old who cause problems. I also notice at water gymnastics that nearly all old Germans, including the men, make a big point of keeping their hair dry. I can’t help thinking that swimming with your neck bent could lead to vertebra problems, but maybe the sport makes up for that.

I found the above illustration in German Wikipedia:

Altdeutsch-Rücken (oft nur Altdeutsch oder auch Deutscher Kraul sowie Rücken-Gleitzug) ist ein Schwimmstil in Rückenlage. Dabei wird auf dem Rücken die Brustbeinschlagbewegung (Grätschschwung) in Kombination mit einem rückenkraulähnlichen Armzug, bei dem jedoch beide Arme zeitgleich bewegt werden, ausgeführt. Das heißt, sowohl Arme als auch Beine werden jeweils simultan und in jedem Moment symmetrisch zur Körperlängsachse bewegt.

It says one advantage of this stroke is that you can see where you’re going – if you bend your neck far enough.

I have also seen a kind of backwards swimming without arm movements, which I believe is supposed to be good for your back, though I don’t know why.

I found a Dutch site, Overview swimming strokes, with English, which shows 150 swimming strokes, with diagrams and animations. Here is a screenshot of part of their big diagram:

I can’t work out which the German backstroke is – it might be the ‘backstroke of Löwenstrom’.

Another peculiarity is that most people swim breaststroke with their heads out of the water. It seems that this is what is taught at school. I started with crawl. Here is some discussion between English-speaking parents in Germany on the topic at Toytown Germany.

So here’s me picturing my kids back in Oz in a few years time —- bobbing up and down in the sea doing breaststroke with their heads above water, getting absolutely nowhere as their cousins have tears streaming down their faces from laughing so hard! (“Don’t worry about us in out in the surf Mum – we learnt this breast-stroke thing in Germany! See we’re not even getting our faces wet!” … and out to sea they drift!)

I’m not sure how many Germans think of November 9 as Tag der Erfinder – Inventors’ Day. After all, we are mainly commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or else Kristallnacht in 1938. But I learn from Stephen Albainy-Jenei at Patent Baristas (via Blawg Review) that this was Hedy Lamarr’s birthday, and she is certainly worth an entry.
I learn from the internet that Inventors’ Day was thought up by Ronald Reagan, that the date in German-speaking countries is November 9 (Hedy Lamarr’s birthday), and that the German end is supported by one Gerhard Muthenthaler (Tag der Erfinder website, German).

So this is a day for patent bloggers.

In any case, I am surprised I have never mentioned Hedy (Hedwig) Lamarr, but here is Stephen’s account:

This week we honor Inventors’ Day (German: Tag der Erfinder), which is celebrated in the German-speaking countries Germany, Austria and Switzerland on November 9, the birthday of inventor and Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr. Lamarr, born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, was an Austrian-born American actress.

Though known primarily for her film career as a major contract star of MGM’s “Golden Age”, she also co-invented an early technique for frequency-hopped spread spectrum communications in 1942, a key to many forms of wireless communication.

She also escaped from Austria and her controlling husband in 1937 in dramatic circumstances and was married several times more after that.

Thanks to Ed., of course.

I have a couple of boxes full of books that I once wanted to read next, but the one I actually intend to read next is Heimsuchung, by Jenny Erpenbeck, which has just come out in an English translation, Visitation. It’s the story of a house near Berlin and twelve successive inhabitants through the political vicissitudes of German history. It is said to take a while to get into (see the German description by Isabel Bogdan) – it does start off 24,000 years earlier when the ice finishes shaping the landscape.

I was alerted to the book not by the review by Michel Faber in the Guardian (which seems to suggest we should not be reading Jonathan Franzen), but from Katy Derbyshire’s weblog love german books (whose RSS feed never works, so I have to go to the site every few days). Katy writes in English and mainly about books already translated into English, and she always gives me the feeling of telling it like it is, as in the latest entry on the reading at Soho House in Berlin from the original and Susan Bernofsky’s translation.

The book came out in paperback in February 2010, and German books take ages to come out in paperback, so it’s not surprising I couldn’t find it in the small bookshops in Fürth at the weekend, but I did order it at Genniges for Monday. What I wonder is whether I would have found it at Hugendubel in Nuremberg, or even Thalia.