Mind your language
When I hear the word Internet, I reach for . . . words fail me. Veronica has been showing me round that dunces' playground. Pity the children who have to copy out bits for their homework!
Lots of people on the Internet think Goebbels said, 'When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver.' More attribute the remark to Goering. To seek more detail illustrates the fragmented pack-ice of the Internet.
Many sites quote standard dictionaries of quotations to affirm that the originator of the sentence was Harms Johst (1890-1978) in his play Schlageter. But none that! can find gives any more than this sentence, with an ellipsis: 'Wenn ich Kultur Wire entsichere ich meinen Browning.' In English: 'I release the safety-catch on my Browning/revolver,' From a letter attempting to correct the attribution in 1981, Susan Sontag was quoted on the New York Review of Books website. But in passing, two new errors are added when she says that in the first performance, for Hitler's birthday in 1933, 'the actor was Viet Harlan, later the lead in Jew Sass'.
Harlan was the director, not the lead — at least in the German film version, Jud Si'ess. And his name was not 'Viet' but Veit Harlan. In that film Ferdinand Marian played Jew Stiss, You can buy a video on the Internet for 35 dollars. There had been an English-language Gaumont-British film of Jew Sass in 1934. I am not criticising Susan Sontag. It is the Internet that proliferates error.
The play Schlageter tells the story of Albert Leo Schlageter (1894-1923) who joined the National Socialist party in 1922, and in 1923 was caught blowing up the Duisburg to Dasseldorf railway line. After trial by a French military court, he was executed by firing squad.
A unit of the Luftwaffe took Schlageter's name in 1938. But a more pleasant tangle of names is involved in the history of a 2901t steel-built three-masted barque (carrying royals over single topgallant sails and double topsails), launched as theAlbert Leo Schlageter at Hamburg in 1938. In 1945 she was captured by the Americans, then became a training ship for the Bra7ilian navy with the name Guanbara. In 1962 she was bought by the Portuguese navy to replace its old training ship Sagres, inheriting her name. (The old Sagres, built in 1896, was eventually restored under her original name of Rickmer Rickmers.) She remains in service, and you can recognise her by the red crosses on her white sails. Very handsome she looks from the photos on the Internet. I hope she is actually still afloat.
Dot Wordsworth
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