Blogging in Plague Time: For My Students

When I take students to Vienna, we always begin our visit with a quick walking tour of the city, partly to orient ourselves, and partly to keep everyone awake on that first afternoon. Among the sights we see is the Plague Column, pictured above in a 1742 engraving by Georg Christoph Kriegl. This remarkable piece of Baroque sculpture, which employs trinitarian motifs to unite political and religious imagery, was erected after one of the last great waves of the plague swept through Vienna in 1679. Emperor Leopold I commissioned it to remember the epidemic and give thanks for the city's salvation.

This seemed like an appropriate image for the first post of this new blog, which I am starting for my students at Houghton College as they have all left to go home in the wake of our own current epidemic. I hope that you students will find this a helpful way to maintain a sense of connection to me and to Houghton during the weeks ahead, when our relationship will be online rather than in person. The posts are likely to be fairly random, and I claim no great significance for them. I will write about whatever happens to be on my mind at the moment. So don't expect much! But it will help us keep in touch.

It seemed appropriate that the psalm in church this morning--which of course I had to hear via livestream--was the 23rd: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

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A Warning Against Drink

I have gotten several things read over the last few days, but I keep forgetting to post any of it. Some more Gotthelf, but also a couple of other things. I'll try to break them up in order to get a few more posts out of them! Last Friday I finished another Gotthelf novella, Wie fünf Mädchen im Branntwein jämmerlich umkommen . That title does not translate very well into English, or at least I don't think so. Something like, How Five Young Women Perish Miserably Due to Brandy (or literally "in brandy"). It is an early work of Gotthelf's and a piece of social criticism. When Gotthelf was writing (1838), the canton of Bern had recently liberalized its system for granting licenses to operate a pub. At the same time, new methods of producing cheap brandy from different sources, including even the ubiquitous potato, were developed. As a consequence, inns and pubs sprang up throughout the countryside, creating a new temptation for poor...

Dursli

Back to Gotthelf! I have already mentioned that I re-read Gotthelf's novella about the five young women who were ruined by drink. Last week I also re-read the second of his two early novellas tackling the problem of rural alcoholism, Dursli, der Brannteweinsäufer, oder Das heilige Weihnachtsabend ( Dursli the Brandy Drinker, or The Holy Christmas Eve ). This story also warns against the pubs springing up all over the Emmentaler countryside and their consequences for the rural poor. But it is also--even more than I had remembered, in fact--set in the broader political context of the times. Gotthelf begins the novella, in fact, before he ever even introduces the main characters, with about a 10-page discourse on the problematic reception in Switzerland of the ideas of the French Revolution. Its call for equality and freedom, he says, is naturally interpreted by the poorer classes not in terms of true Christian equality and freedom, but rather as a ...

"Plague Time" Essay Contest

If you are a major or minor in History, Political Science, Augmented History, Humanities, or German Studies, you are eligible to enter a brand-new essay contest being sponsored by the Department of History and Political Science. Details available here . And if you aren't a major or minor in one of those areas... it is not too late to become one now !

Plague Time

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