Alaturi de Spanac pe Strada Hanovra

Nu am putut rezista unei invitatii de a scrie acest articol, desi nu voi participa la concurs. Am sa scriu in lb engleza deoarece mi-a cerut-o Spanac in mod insistent, desi recunosc ca eu nu prea am exercitiul de a ma exprima in scris in mod haios in lb engleza, ci mai mult birocratic comun si mai rar, ff rar, romantic, (care in cazul meu in lb engleza nu suna caraghios nici macar intrigant, ci total banal, chiar posibil cliseistic). In lb romana nu m-am exprimat in scris niciodata romantic, iar comicul imi reuseste adesea ca nuca in perete, mai mult fara sa vreau, asa ca aici pe blog. In lb franceza, in schimb, nu ma pot exprima in scris decat romantic, si de fapt imi dau seama ca singurele scrisori de dragoste pe care le-am scris eu vreodata au fost in lb franceza, pe cand in lb scandinave ma pot exprima in scris numai total caraghios ! La nivel de comunicat oral si prin gesturi e mai altfel...imi dau seama acum ca mai des am reusit probabil sa fiu romantic in niste limbi pe care nici nu le cunosc, rusa si germana !!!! Zau, daca nu e clar ca e chiar posibil sa fiu un pic si eu ucrainean, macar la niveluri asa influentat culturale din partea aia mai sudica non-poloneza ! Desi e mai mult probabil invatat din filmele dedicate celui de-al 2lea razboi mondial ! In treacat fie zis, am impresia ca tind sa evit si chiar incerc sa refuz uneori sa ma exprim oral si gestic romantic in lb inventata de dl Walt Disney, desi la nivel rational tind sa fiu de acord cu promovarea cat mai extinsa a culturii acestui limbaj pe teme romantic educative, in conditiile in care se considera ca romantismul larg social e absolut necesar si preferabil altor maniere de expresie, si de altfel maj comunicatelor mele mai serioase pe teme romantice in mediu social mai larg public live si chiar si in scris vor fi de natura promo Disney.)

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I am not sure if many people know that the names of Hanover Square and Hanover Street, for a time globally famous in the latter part of the 20th century with the assistance of equally famous Han Solo, were also earlier regionally famous with the help of the 1st Earl of Scarbrough, lord Richard Lumley, a gentleman originally from northern England, once, early in his career, Master of the Horse for lady Catherine de Braganza, herself a gentlewoman of potuguese origin for a while Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland, who taught the British how to enjoy their cup of tea. Lord Lumley was one of the group known as the Immortal Seven Englishmen who invited in 1689 in writing William Henry, Prince of Orange, born in The Netherlands, at the time lieutenant governor of the Dutch provinces of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland, and Overijssel, to overthrow King James II of England in a Glorious Revolution and become King William III of England. I think they admired his obvious administrative bureaucratic skills, in which the Protestants had been known at the time to excel, sometimes even to the detriment of their scholarly more intellectual or more spiritual exploits, (with some obvious notable exceptions). But he was also the son-in-law of James II, so it wasn't such a big deal, anyway not more than a habitual family squabble over who would be ruler of the Free World, and in fact they even paved the way for the USA to become ruler of this Free World, since they encouraged the colonists to revolt against some tea import taxes established by James II, obviously not thinking that the colonists would actually wish to become totally independent. After William Henry, Prince of Orange, graciously accepted this offer he probably felt he could not refuse, Lord Lumley decided to dedicate some of his time to real estate development in London, and, being a strong supporter of the Hanoverian Succession, in which the son of Sophie of Palatinate, (herself daughter of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia), and of Ernest Augustus of Brunswick-Luneburg, (ruler of the Principality of Calenberg, Prince Elector of Hanover, ancestor of Diana, Princess of Wales), would become George I, King of the United Kingdom and Ireland, he decided to develop a fashionable residential address in London, an address which has remained quite fashionable today, although it is dedicated more to office space, e.g. for the London office of Vogue, rather than to personal residences, and to name it Hanover Square.

Meanwhile, on the continent, the region of Hanover described a rather swampy territory later known as Lower Saxony, a territory generally known to have been earlier and traditionally inhabited by some people known as Saxons because they seem to have favored for hundreds of years a type of knife with a straight blade called seax, a rather crude and not very aesthetic tool, (the most talented and creative Saxon designers having most likely chosen to continually emigrate both westward and eastward to be nearer the more inspired celts of the UK and Ireland, or nearer the descendents of the dacians of Transylvania and Moldavia, where they most certainly would have found better opportunities for apprenticeship with traditional master toolmakers for learning to make more varied and better designed types of tools, as fit for an European medieval civilization, the seaxes being found useful over time only greatly modified and assembled in the guise of scissors, first in Finland and Estonia by master tailors, later in Italy by master hairdressers...I kid u not, pretty much all the ethnic and cultural social groups of Europe, including even the Scots and the Welsh, were making fun of the Saxons and their seaxes at the time of Charlemagne, only much later, actually at the very time Lord Lumley was reviewing the plans for the Hanover Square development in London, did Friederich Handel manage to improve a tad their image in the eyes of the always pretentious European intellectual crowd with the help of a rather risque operatic concert presented at the International Carnival of Venice in 1709 !) That Hanover region also contained a town, with the same name as the greater region, established there in the middle of the 17th century.

During the 18th century Hanover was joined in an official "personal union" with the United Kingdom. Hanover's ruler was the same person as the King of the United Kingdom. Even while still engaged in that personal union, in 1803 the territory of Hanover was practically occupied, even annexed by the French, advancing East under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte. After the abdication of Napoleon and hist first exile to Elba, Hanover became independent in 1814 and even became a real kingdom, the Kingdom of Hanover, between 1814 and 1866, initially still in a personal union with the UK. That personal union ended with the ascension of Queen Victoria to the throne in 1837, because of the Salic Law that governed many of the monarchies in Europe, which did not permit females to become monarchs in those various lands which kept appearing and disappearing over time across this continent, so between 1837 and 1866 the king of the Kingdom of Hanover was an uncle of Queen Victoria, Ernest Augustus. He was not well liked by the new class of Hannoverian intellectuals because he wanted to change the Constitution, which he considered too liberal, and even dismissed the brothers Grimm, along 5 other professors, (Dahlmann, a historian and politician, Gervinus, a political and literary historian who wrote the first comprehensive textbook about the history of German literature, Albrecht, a constitutional jurist, Ewald, a theologian and orientalist, and Weber, a physicist scientist, who alongside world famous mathematician Gauss invented one of the the first ergonomically functional electromagnetic telegraphs), all known as the Gottingen Seven, from their professorial positions at the University of Gottingen, because they protested publicly against his political-administrative leadership style. So pretty much most Hannoverians were probably ready at the time to divorce the UK and be annexed by Prussia, (although they initially officially declared war against her, but that was because they were probably in love with her anyway.) Apparently, after WW2, in 1946, the British tried to reinstate a German province named the Land of Hanover, within the same theoretical borders of the earlier Kingdom of Hanover, but the Hannoverians preferred instead to merge with 3 other regions or former small states, (Oldenburg, Brunswick, and Schaumburg-Lippe), into a larger state known as Lower Saxony, while declaring Hanover as the capital of that new state.

From a small fishermen and ferrymen village along the river Leine during earlier Medieval times, later more rapidly expanded as a town during the times of the Hanseatic League due to its situation at a relatively busy crossroads for commercial travel over land and water, today's Hanover is a real city with 1/2 million people (and a little over 1 million counted altogether in the larger metropolitan area). It has sadly lost, maybe forever, its entire Jewish population because not one single rabbi was willing to remain there after 1951, even if some of the survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp tried to resettle in Hanover and retain a rabbi among them, but he left, and no other was ever willing to replace him. Most of the remaining people left to America. Very few of them had originally been from Hanover anyway, because most of those had been deported to Poland, and obviously couldn't come back. Plus they had been blamed to have started WW2, or anyway Kristallnacht. Yes, the official story, for both sides, even for many of the Jews themselves, was that Kristallnacht was initiated as a retaliation to the action of a Polish Jew originally from Hanover, Herschel Grynszpan, who had shot a German embassy official in Paris, (himself, allegedly, maybe ironically, at the time, under investigation by the Gestapo for "aiding Jews".) Hanover's infrastructure had been bombed to almost total destruction by the Allies. Who the hell were they expecting to clean and reconstruct it ? The former prisoners from Bergen-Belsen, (the very ones who were showed emaciated, starving, dying, in the news after the libration of that camp) ? Maybe import some re-imported Polish Jews again ? Maybe some non-Jewish Poles would have been a better idea ? Let them work to reconstruct Hanover, since Poles are "known" to be hard workers. But everyone had to wait for that until the Iron Curtain fell, so pretty much this is maybe why the architectural soul of today's Hanover is actually boring, (with the exception of a reconstructed originally creative type of bridge design named Lavesbrucke, imagined by neoclassical architect and construction engineer Georg Ludwig Friedrich Laves in the first part of the 19th century, who also designed a rather pretty and probably sunny giant Barbie dollhouse type home for himself.) This is also maybe, with a higher degree of speculation involved, why today Hanover has absolutely no good German restaurants, just a mixture of various pseudo-exotic postmodern locales from some younger entrepreneurs from Greece, Italy, Africa, and an occasional French one. German cuisine has lost its soul once it chased almost all of its traditional Jewish mothers and grandmothers away. They were the ones who had been feeding for several generations the starving Saxons who had remained in the center of Europe, maybe also several of the other Germanic tribes, maybe not all, of course, and sometimes maybe even against a degree of reluctance or ambivalence from the part of some of the more highly educated own daughters and sons who wished most of all, as many studious youngsters seem to do, to assimilate. (I am not speaking from a strictly Jewish experience here, but from the experience of a rather reluctant, better said, risk adverse, occasional and almost accidental pastoral wanderer, with absolutely no special expertise about food or even pastoral literature.)

Among the famous and important people with lives and destinies intertwined with Hanover's are 2 philosophers, (although one of them wished to identify herself as otherwise, considering maybe at her historical time of her life that the business of philosophy may be a rather egotistical, also maybe singularly subjective and not always lucid one), the first, (chronologically), being Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, (the local University of Hanover deciding to name itself after him relatvely recently, in 2006, probably having reassured itself that by this time the fans of Monsieur de Voltaire would not be making fun of them for doing so after all, since it had managed to develop into a more complex educational institution since it had been first founded as a vocational technical high school in 1831), the second thinker being Johanna "Hannah" Arendt, (who is known to have been written the books named The Origins of Totalitarism, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil, and also a collection of biographical essays about interesting people such as philosopher Karl Jaspers, Pope John XXIII, and renowned author Isaak Dinesen/Karen Blixen, in a volume named Men in Dark Times, and who preferred to call herself a political theorist rather than a philosopher). Also known as being originally from Hanover are 2 astronomers, brother and sister, Frederick William Herschel, who apparently discovered the planet Uranus and its two major moons, Titania and Oberon, plus to other moons of the already known planet Saturn, and Caroline Lucretia Herschel, who discovered several comets, one of which, a periodical comet which orbits the Sun in 155 years, is named after her, comet 35P/Herschel- Rigollet, (Rigollet being the one who had the chance to see it from France in 1939). More recent famous people include the winner of the 2010 Eurovision contest, artist Lena, who sang the song Satellite, the musical group Scorpions, and politician Gerhard Fritz Kurt Schroder, (who would have been about 21 years old when the band Scorpions came into existence, whose father, a senior lance corporal in the Wermacht, had been killed in combat during the latter stages of WW2 on the territory of Romania, near Cluj, a few months after the birth of his son, son who would be later decorated with the Grand Cross category of the Romanian Star Order around the time he was still Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.)

Here is a video presentation of today's touristic Hanover highlights: