Kate’s tagged me. Who would I want to play me in the film of my life? I’d like to actually start writing a learned post about Hal Hartley movies and the representation of our lives which might be worthy of a Fenella Kernebone, but that would be evading the question, would it not?
So, although I have left many textual and emotional fragments and traces of my life scattered around the world and the interwebs - for good and for ill - for a biographer to compile my life (and remember - thinking of your life in this way enforces responsibility - for instance, I have to stand by whatever I said in the minutes of the 77th Council of The University of Queensland Union and perhaps in particular when I was briefly President of the Union, and articles I wrote for Semper Floreat because someone could potentially access both from the library of my Alma Mater), I doubt there will ever be a film.
I have absolutely no problem with this, by the way, as I believe both in Merleau-Ponty’s concept of our life as a progressive sedimentation and the Catholic idea that we will answer for all that we do. I place my trust in the fact that my intentions are usually good, no matter how their performance is flawed, and the Divine Mercy and the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And the sacraments. If we open our hearts, grace will come to us, awful and terrible, almost against our wills. As Jacques Derrida, late and much lamented, also argued, we have a responsibility for the signatures and corpus that we leave behind us. And indeed for our hauntings, and our revenants after we are gone, and what our heirs will make of it all.
However, having gone out with someone whose avowed aim was to be as much like Juliette Binoche in the film Damage as she possibly could be, I would like to be played by Jeremy Irons. And for a whole host of other reasons. Including reasons to do with the French Lieutenant’s Woman, film and novel both. Which have partly to do with my execrable vanity (that’s a quote - or an adaptation/citation/iteration from Qoheleth the Preacher - if you haven’t read him, you should) and more to do with the resonances between English reserve and Prussian reserve. But I’ll say no more, I think. I’ll leave you to interpret the visual text as you will. It’s not my affair, after all. If you want to take this as a tag for your blog, that’s your affair. Feel free. Just send a trackback.
Yes, well said, Mark, the points about responsibility are made eloquently, though I’m sure you made them with the aid of Pinot Noir
Juliette Binoche looks like me. Just saying…
Can I play her in the movie?
Which reminds me of a Chisel song:
Which now that I think of it is not apt as you should be very choosy when picking your Binoche lookalikes!
Without wishing to give too much away, Kim, amen to that!
Interesting post Mark. Id probably have to go Anthony Andrews from ER / top gun, simply on the basis that he looks uncannily like me. Is that his name? when I was in the US I got approached all the time by people who thought I was him. Apparently he lost a patient once, balled, and it made my Mother cry. I dunno, never watched it myself.
More expansively, I find Foucault helpful on ones “life story”. There’s an urge to reframe the past so that it is made to represent a coherent trajectory to the present, or at least, ones understanding of it. I think people need that narrative of consistency - which is one of the main problems of poststructuralist historiography. Humans are just like this. Give them an alternate narrative, sure, but deconstruction will ultimately get you nowhere with them. You aint gonna make it with anyone, anyhow etc. History may have a more important task than handmaiden to philosophy, the necessary birth of truth and values, Michel, but Ive never seen it.
Incidentally, Herr Bahnisch, I now have a Prussian - Australian ancestry in the fam, courtesy of my daughter’s Mum!
All my nuttiness comes from the Danish/English/Irish bits of my ancestry, Lefty E, and none from the Prussian, I think! But I’m proudest of the Prussian!
Yes, my partner’s mob escaped the Junkers and conscription for the Franco-Prussian war. They were hidden away down on the Logan river from about 1870 and spoke German until at least the 1920s.
Im quite interested in the history of that wave of migration - now that Im related to it!
Brian’s your man for that, Lefty E - his parents (aka my grandparents) certainly had German as their first language growing up northwest of Toowoomba.
Our mob turned up on these shores post 1848 and the King of Prussia’s collapse of the Lutheran Church into state Calvinism, as I understand it, so just a little bit earlier than your partner’s family. There are also Bahnisches in SA - we’re all related - those of us living in Oz.
There’s a little bit written - by UQ German and History dep’t people from a while back. I also ran across an actress/director/playwright a few years back from a similar background who was writing a play about the experience of Germans on the Darling Downs - but she moved to Melb. in search of more fruitful theatrical vistas and we lost touch - so I’m not certain whether it was ever produced.
Did your partner go to UQ, Lefty E? I think I may have put 2 and 2 together but I won’t give anything away here. Just say yes or no!
Yes Mark - Ive done a bit of reading about all this. You family was in the first wave - and the (first) QLD colonial government was very impressed with that lot, as they were seeking conservative types of protestant for land settlement schemes (and to provide a solid bulwark against Irish Catholics!). So they welcomed a lot of Prussians in the 1860s (including my partners mob)- unfortunately for the QLD government, they were anti-Junker emigres in the main, and came to form one key support group for early QLD liberalism, which was very German influenced - big on state education for the working classes, not so big on the vote!
She did go to UQ Mark - but I dont know whether you would have known her - I didnt back then in those days. Initials JF.
I’ve sent a link to Brian, Lefty E, so it’ll be interesting to see what he has to say.
Did some reading a while back about German immigration to the South in America - provided a very nice leaven there for the forces of political niceness.
JF doesn’t ring a bell - I thought she might have been ZA!
Yes, I might have a blog-chat with Brian about it. My partner’s not overly interested in it all, but Im quite into it, for my daughter’s sake. When she hits me in the head with a book at 7am I do tend to notice the Prussian in her.
Ah, ZA…. no, that’s long ago… Didnt know she had the Dem Deutschen Volk in her! There you go.
Ah, a passion for literacy is such a good thing at that age - Prussian or whatever!
Yes for ZA. I’m remembering a drunken conversation about 15 odd years ago, though, so maybe I’m wrong. I’m sure you’re a very lucky man - so is ZA’s partner to be sure!
Trust you to go all intellectual-like, Mark… geez.
It’s unbelievable, isn’t it? He writes three whole paragraphs before he even gets to the decision. The we find out he’s apparently been thinking about Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche making the hot lovin’. Yeah, that’s right, I’ve got hot buttered Binoche on the mind…so let’s talk about UQ student politics, Poncy-Merlot and Derrida first?!! Mark, you are beyond redemption.
Haven’t got time this morning. I’ll have a look tonight.
Well I did say it was solipsistic.
The Review of Blogs will be pleased anyway that it’s not about politics!
Lefty, not sure I can fulfil Mark’s expectations. I did an essay 40 years ago on German settlement in Australia when I was studying German. It was an exercise in writing ‘auf Deutsch’ and not marked so much on content. I remember reading a book about the extensive name changes in both world wars (eg Engelsburg to Kalbar.)
I also borrowed a German study published in the 1920 from a Lutheran pastor I knew.
Our ancestor came from what is now southern Poland and was then known as Silesia from a village near Breslau (now Wroclaw) in 1848. He was a man-servant.
That mob went to the Barossa Valley. Around 1908-9 three families, I think, two Stillers and a Hoffmann, went to Qld and settled in a place called Downfall Creek, near Guluguba, between Miles and Wandoan, which for those that don’t know is west of Toowoomba towards Roma. My father’s elder sister, grabbed her two young brothers (their mum had died and her father remarried) and followed about 1914.
My mum, who was 3/4 German, was given to the Hoffmanns as a foster child as they left Adelaide. Not sure what part of Germany her German blood comes from, but she didn’t know any of her blood relatives until she was over 40.
The main thing I remember from the German study was that although they migrated on an issue of religious tolerance when they got here they immediately split into 7 groups (from memory) who were absolutely intolerant of each other. That was solved eventually and in the 1950s there were only two Lutheran churches in Australia, the United Evangelican Lutheran Church (our mob) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church, known as the ‘Missouri’ Lutherans. Something to do with the American Lutherans, I’m not sure what, but more fundamental in orientation than the others. I believe they got together in 1966.
I went to St Peter’s College, Indooroopilly, as a boarder in the 1950s. Apart from the progeny of New Guinea missionaries and non-Lutheran Chinese and Indians from SE Asia New Guinea and Fiji, most of the kids came from places like Marburg, the Lockyer Valley, Toowoomba and surrounds, Kingaroy/Gayndah/Mundubbera and some from south and SW of Brisbane.
I think perhaps the earliest settlement in Qld was in 1838 at Zion’s Hill at Nundah in the Kedron Brook catchment area .
btw I understand the correct form of our name was B√§hnisch. I’ve just checked the white pages and there are about equal numbers under the name of Baehnisch around Australia. I believe they are the same mob.
I’ve just found this pic of our little church at Downfall Creek. I suspect it was not actually built in 1911 and the photo taken a fair bit later.
I’ve just found this chronology of German arrivals. It seems the 1848 mob got here in 1849 and not quite for the reasons I’d thought (sigh). It says:
Thanks Brian, sehr interessant.
Ive got a feeling you’re right, from what Ive red, and the 1848 Germans weren’t just politicos. For one thing, as i said yesterday, the QLD government was impressed by their illiberalism, and invited more, but got the wrong sort, escaping Junker conscription and others late feudal malaises! When you read teh Worker through the late 1890s they always put out electoral notices in German as well as English.
My daughter’s great great-grandfather, surname Fischer, arrived in 1865, and got a small settler plot of land at Eagleby on the Logan River. The QLD version agrarian vision of a small protestant family in the land as the moral backbone of settlement etc. They grew cane. Its still in the family, and the old shed has 19th c. buggies in it. Every street name around there is a German one, and Steglitz is the suburb down the road. The cemetary is instructive - every grave is in german until WW1. My partner’s Dad still occasionally finds buried jars of sovereigns on the property - which his grandather had buried in case they were all interned. Which they weren’t (common when there were no Anglos in town)
My mother taught in toowoomba and tells me there are still numers of German speakers on the downs.
Lefty E, someone who taught in the School of Public Health at one stage?
Oh yes, and thanks for that great link. This is the relevant scheme that brought my daughter’s ancestors out. Incidentally, I understand emigration stoppped in the 1870s after uniication and, then, industrialisation - emigration was prohibited for a while for labour market reasons, need for a urban workforce.
1861
The Queensland government appointed Johann Christian Heußler (>>), a German businessman in Brisbane, as immigration agent for continental Europe. Queensland had become a separate colony two years earlier and was keen to attract German settlers who would open up new areas. In order to compete with other Australian colonies such as SA and Victoria that were already attractive to German settlers, Queensland offered subsidised transport from Germany to the colony. Heußler went to Germany and his system was so successful that by 1879 over 17,000 German-speakers had settled in Queensland. Most of them were farmers and agricultural labourers from the poor regions of Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and Wurttemberg, and the majority moved to rural areas of the colony. Large numbers settled in the Rosewood, Fassifern, Lockyer and Darling Downs regions, and later in Mackay, Bundaberg and Maryborough. The Germans settled in some districts whose terrain and vegetation had been rejected by British settlers as being too difficult.
Dont think so Mark - but then Fischer is a pretty common German surname.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention - I’ve seen their original reisepass (visa). They were from Templehof - then a small rural village in Prussia, now one of the Berlin airports.
Well if she’s not a sociologist, Lefty E, I don’t think we’re acquainted!
Ausgezeichnete Geschichte, Herr Bähnisch. Und Du, Sinistro, Du hast Scharfe S bewundernswert benutzt. Sprichst Du Deutsch zusätzlich zum Spanischen?
I still reckon our lot from Silesia were not artisans or middle class revolutionaries. I think the district was known for potato growing.
Mark, I wonder if you can identify what in your Prussian heritage you are proud of. I guess there is a strong sense of duty, a virtue and a cross to bear. Similarly stickability and endurance and a fairly simple direct approach to relationships, faithfulness etc.
But also dogmatic authoritarianism, and an unquestioning attitude to mattters of religious faith.
Certainly the soil, the weather, the land as it was in my youth is indelibly imprinted on my soul.
btw I think I was the first from the district to go to university and as far as I know the only one to bother my head with things like philosophy. Having lost my faith I’m a standing example of the folly of such ventures.
Buck, my parents spoke German, I believe a combination of two dialects which had their own development path in Australia, importing quite a few anglicised words. My father spoke no English until he was 12 in 1910 when they brought in a law that all school instruction should be in English.
During WW2 our folks gave up speaking German in the home, as we had ‘Australian’ working men on the farm. I guess it was good employee relations and they didn’t want to be interned, which they weren’t because they were producing butter, eggs, meat, grain and all those good things.
I learnt German at school and university, mostly through reading German literature and philosophy, but also some conversational German.
I haven’t kept it up, so I can read a fair bit with dictionary zu Hande, but talking and writing is a pain.
My German’s about the same level: rustier than Munchhausen’s sabre. That said, my father and grandfather both spoke it, and I can’t seem the damn Sprache to shake. My question was actually to Lefty Elitist (Sinistro), but thanks for answering too!
“and I can‚Äôt seem the damn Sprache to shake”
Love the German grammar.
Na ja, Herr Fyodor, meines Deutsch ist immer noch scheisse, my vocabular wenige als genug, meiner gramatische schrecklich, und meine accent lachen zu machen.
Ich hatte nur ein bischen gelernt fur eine deutsche freundin, zeit zehn jahre. Sie hat mir verlasst weil mein deutsch zu viel hesslich war.
Die antwort: meines Spansichen ist ganz besser.
Kannst du etwas damit anfangen?
* ich rolle auf dem Fußboden und lache *
Jawohl. Ganz genug, Señor, ganz genug. Es ist immer so mit Mädchen. Dieses kann Dir uberraschen, aber die deutsche Frauen besonders haben kein Gefuhl fur Humor.
My mother is German, her parents are from what was Prussia (their actual village is now part of Poland, I think, though it’s hard to tell as neither of them liked speaking about the past.) They arrived after WWII after the Russians invaded. My mother’s maiden name was Bellegardt.
I don’t speak a word of German, though I am keen to go there and trace my ancestry.
I don’t speak a word of German, either, Kate - that wouldn’t be far from where the Bahnisches are from - since Breslau is now Wroclaw in Poland. There’s a book that looks good on the social history of the city - which I think changed countries and rulers (and thus names) on a fairly regular basis, which I keep meaning to buy.
We should organise the LP Prussian pilgrimage some time!
I speak plenty of words of German, just no sentences.
Das stimmt, Fy? Or are you still on the footboards from my last bout of Kraut?
That sounds fun. You could wear pointy purple helmets ;>
You’re on Mark. I prefer to wear Purple Lederhosen myself, Fyodor.
But Lederhosen are Bavarian, Kate! Though maybe with my Benedictophilia, they’d be appropriate!
It’s OK, I’m pretty sure the Prussians were also into leather.
See how little I know?
I normally wouldnt be so shameless in self promotion but the net was slow tonight and it took me two bloody hours to do. So. I have done mine.
http://flopearedmule.blogspot.com/2005/09/ready-for-my-close-up-mr-marquand.html
I’m liking Fiona, Amanda!
Here ya go Mark. The very latest (2003!) on the Divine Miss F.
http://www.modamag.com/fiona.htm
She really has the 80s hottie look, Amanda!