Reading list for April 2005

I haven't done much reading this month (other than work-related stuff that is far too dull to mention here), just a few pages of Döblin at breakfast and a few pages of von Ranke before sleep (and sometimes in the middle of the night).

The Döblin is turning out very interesting. The Thirty Years' War was a particularly horrible time (a religious uprising brutally repressed, turned into a civil war, which turned into an international conflict), and Wallenstein is one of the principal villains of the period: ambitious, cunning, greedy, relentless, brutal, and with an eye for exploitable weaknesses in others.

Katja Blomberg walks a narrow and slippery rope spanned between her apparent desire to tell us where the bones are buried in the business of collecting art, and the obsequious kid-glove handling that the big collectors demand. Were Blomberg to state outright e.g. that Bernd Künne acted immorally (though not illegally) in selling for personal profit works that had been presented the year before at the public's expense in a national gallery, she would (as the saying goes) never work again. We are left to read between the lines and become outraged on our own.

Currently reading
Alfred Döblin, Wallenstein in German - still!
Leopold von Ranke, Geschichte des Altertums in German - still!

Recently read
Katja Blomberg Wie Kunstwerte entstehen in German.

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