L’Idée d’Europe II – Printen

L.v.d.D. woodcut Printen mold, Cafe Van den Daele, 2011

When in 1890, Leo van den Daele of Ghent opened a patisserie on Büchelstraße in Aachen’s Old Town, he could not have imagined how emblematic the shop would become over a century later. Issued from a Belgian noble family, Van den Daele settled across the border with the idea of developing recipes for a series of sweet delicacies. But his reputation grew from the masterful Printen gingerbread figures he cast from woodcuts and metal engravings and that sold like hotcakes during the Christmas season.

The Fleming was only following the example of his countrymen, copper craftsmen from Dinant who four centuries earlier had preceded him as emigrants, carrying with them the tradition of engraved pastries to the former Free Imperial City.

In every room of the present-day café, in the hallways and stairwell, Van den Daele’s molds hang against a backdrop of red brocade and green satin, wooden panels and Flemish blue porcelain tiles.

The genesis of their forms coincides with the end of Medieval Europe and the dawn of Europe’s golden age of old master prints, issued from the same roots and ushered in by Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press around 1440. For the next few centuries, artists like Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt earned greater renown in their lifetime from their widely disseminated prints rather than from their paintings. Not only did the printing press revolutionize art and letters, it shook up the old coordinates of Europe, transforming and universalizing its science, knowledge, communication, rendering the dream of widespread literacy possible. And from that moment on, information technology sped on the rails of exponential innovation, nothing less.

Six degrees of separation

«Castles on the Rhine», 2011

What does Burg Katz, a castle overlooking the Rhine, have to do with WikiLeaks? When its looming shadow materialized on the opposite shore before dawn, the passengers of the train thought: nothing. Nothing at all, except when one falls into the rabbit hole of links. The hourglass sand falls, the fern’s shadow crawls. And two names that would never have coincided in real life are on the web interconnected.

Like the legendary Rhine castle of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) where the hero Siegfried meets his doom, Burg Katz was also set in flames, and must have been a formidable sight, a firebrand and its blazing reflection in the twilight. Its destroyer, Napoleon, was riding on a tide of victories in 1806, whose crest was Austerlitz. He bombarded what previous centuries of war between France and the German princes had hitherto spared. That was how the former abode of the Counts of Katzenelnbogen (the first cultivators of Germany's quintessential wine, the Riesling), became ruins until nearly a century later when it was rebuilt as the Burg Neukatzenelnbogen (the New Cat’s Elbow Castle). Decidedly a syllable too long, everyone hence called it Burg Katz, or Cat’s Castle.

But back to the rabbit hole. Burg Katz is the setting of one of comic book character Yoko Tsuno’s adventures, L’Orgue du Diable (The Devil’s Organ). The character is unusual in that she is the product of a Belgian writer’s imagination, who was inspired by a Parisian cabaret dancer and actress, Yoko Tani.

The Asian counterpart of Josephine Baker, Tani first drew the attention of international audiences for her role on the silver screen as a Vietnamese nightclub hostess in the American adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.

Set in French Indochina, Greene’s novel foreshadows future American involvement and war in Vietnam. The eponymous American is the bright and idealistic but woefully ignorant Alden Pyle, who has had no real experience in Southeast Asia.

It has been observed that his character may have been based, at least in part, on US military counter-insurgency expert Edward Lansdale, who was stationed in Vietnam 1953-1957.

Lansdale happened to be the direct supervisor of Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who released the Pentagon Papers, during the latter’s two years of service in Vietnam. On June 17, 2010, Mr Ellsberg appeared on Democracy Now! in front of Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales to defend the alleged actions of Pfc. Bradley Manning, arrested and thrown into solitary confinement for leaking, among other documents, a classified video of a US military helicopter gunning down unarmed Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists, to (the final link) WikiLeaks.

So there you have it:

Burg Katz – Yoko Tsuno – Yoko Tani – The Quiet American – Edward Lansdale – Daniel Ellsberg – WikiLeaks

Six degrees of separation¹

Burg Katz also happens to overlook the Lorelei rock (see previous post). Curiouser and curiouser, further north of the Rhine is its rival, Burg Maus (Mouse Castle), built in the 14th century to secure the Elector of Trier’s borders against the Counts of Katzenelnbogen.

¹Thanks to Wikipedia

the skies over Aachen

Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. - «Entreciel», 1979

Parlez-moi de la pluie et non pas du beau temps
Le beau temps me dégoûte et m’fait grincer les dents
Le bel azur me met en rage car le plus grand amour
Qui m’fut donné sur terre, je l’dois au mauvais temps
Je l’dois à Jupiter, il me tomba d’un ciel d’orage

Speak to me of the clouds, speak to me of the rain
Fair days drive me in rage, they go against my grain
The azure skies will only make me blue
For the greatest love to ever fall in my view
I owe to Jupiter and to his thunder coup
On the wings of a hurricane it blew.

— Georges Brassens, L'Orage (The Storm)


My love tells me that before the clouds of the Atlantic move inland over the continent, they first relieve themselves over Aachen and the Low Countries. That is why, evening and morn’, the cobblestones of the city glisten romantically and mirror the festive comings and goings of Christmastide.

At 10 o’clock in the morning, while we were seated at breakfast in one of the ornamental rooms of Café Van den Daele, a gust of wind brought a tinkering of rain against the windowpanes. Beyond the prism of hand-blown 17th-century glass, the pine wreaths and their twinkling lights swayed to and fro over the street below. They brightened and dimmed to the fluctuating hues of the lathered sky above. How rapidly the nimbus traversed the atmosphere, and the stratus and the cumulus, now cloaking, now revealing the city.

Dampness is perpetual in Aix-la-Chapelle, with water pouring from the sky and water welling from the earth; the Romans called the place Aquis-Granum or Aquis Villa. Granted, it was in reference to the thermal springs that made a spa town out of a marsh. Of all places, Charlemagne set his sights on Aix to be the heart of his Empire. “For the waters,” it was written. As the Romans had discovered, natural hot springs can be comforting when you are wintering in the company of 12,000 soldiers. And what about Aix-en-Provence rather?

One of the founding fathers of Europe, Charlemagne is called, making Aachen a European city par excellence. By his imperial will, the towering Carolus Magnus, son of Pepin the Short, built and shaped a city’s and a continent’s destiny. Under Constantine’s motto, “One Empire, one God, one Emperor,” he tore down the Irminsul of the pagan Saxons and erected instead an octagonal dome dedicated to the Virgin Mary, his own pillar to heaven beyond the clouds. And water fell in ever greater quantities, and the city prospered and became one of the most beautiful of cities north of the Alps, drawing luminaries and crowning kings and emperors for 600 years. And whereas the clouds take cue whenever they pass over the cathedral of Aachen, the Allied pilots took care to spare it during their bombardment of Germany in WWII.

Gazing out at the warped sky, we measure the fleeting thoughts of Europe and Empire and the Euro crisis….

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