Happy Martinmas!

A tradition on St. Martin's Eve or Day is to share a goose for dinner. [Wikipedia]

Austria

Wilhelm Gause, Driving Mayor Lueger to the Prater

Tannhäuser's Confession

For all that pompous but small-minded Catholic clergymen like to condemn Wagner as "pagan" and even "dangerous", his music is very much in the Catholic tradition of Germanic art. His most Catholic work is almost certainly Tannhäuser.

The Golden Age of Comics blog has a selection of illustrations for it by the great Hungarian book illustrator Willy Pogany here. The above picture showing the eponymous hero's begging for absolution from the Pope (presumably either Urban IV or Clement IV - but hey, it's Wagner, so actual history isn't that important) is amongst the murals in the King's bedroom in Neuchwanstein Castle in Bavaria.

'Peoples of Europe, protect your holy heritage'

Britannia is clearly identifiable, followed by (from left to right) Italia, Austria, Russia, Germania and (standing for France) Marianne. The angel is the Archangel St Michael. This painting by the German artist Hermann Knackfuß in 1895 was a present by Kaiser Wilhelm to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. It represents the challenge to Christian Europe to unite against the godless "Yellow Peril" of the East.

Who actually voted for Hitler?

How did Hitler come to power? Actually, it was because people voted for him.

But who?

Here's a nifty graphic that one doesn't see every day.

[Civics and Citizenship - Discovering Democracy Units]

It’s hard not to feel that after the end of the German Empire the mainstream Social Democrats to a certain extent blew it. When Weimar Germany’s first great disaster (i.e. hyperinflation) struck, the SDs lost a lot of support both to the Communists and to the main protestant conservative party, the DNVP, which was indeed Germany’s most important party throughout the 1920s.

More importantly though, it was from the DNVP itself, after the second great disaster (the Great Depression) struck, that the Nazis gained a lot of their support, as well as from first-time voters.

Ministranten beim Gebet

by Felix von Ende, ca.1888