30 thoughts on “*Ouke*toberfest 2016!

  1. Just a reminder as I look at the dipshits in the gif above: Goethe, Planck, Schiller, Beethoven, Böll, Hesse, Bach, Dürer, the Reformaton.

      1. I had Hesse in my list! Das Glasperlenspiel ftw!

        But your list is excellent too. Can't claim Musil and Mozart, but how about Thomas Mann. Der Zauberberg!

        And Hieronymus Bosch

        1. I forgot Mahler. Also too Wagner (shut up, he did change everything) Mendelssohn, Wolf, (my god, how could we forget him!) and various Strausses.

          Which made me dig |this up|, arguably the most magnificent of magnificent German poems, set to transcendent music by Richard Strauss before his weird period, and sung by the incomparable Jessie Norman.

          1. Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
            Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind;
            Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm,
            Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.

          2. For all their scrupulous efficiency and clear-eyed humorlessness, nobody brings teh sentimental schmaltz like das germanische Volk. Great stuff!

          3. If Austrians are allowed (and they probably should be) then we have to let Mozart in, along with novelist Robert Musil. Add bean-counter Mendel, and this completes my very short list of Austrian geniuses. That erstwhile paperhanger from Branau am Inn kind of ruined it for everybody else.

            Also too: "Germany" and "Austria" are pretty recent constructs, built at unimaginable costs to everybody.

          4. That asshole should have stuck to landscape painting. And all this Putin talk about "Greater Russia" and protecting Russian language speakers is making me very uneasy.

          1. He was such a great ur-snarky talent on the first year of "Saturday Night Live." Hard to figure why he wanted to quit that and make kid movies instead.

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