Sunday, March 29, 2020

Ingmar Bergman - My Life in the Germany of the 1930s




 
In the summer when I was sixteen, I was sent to Germany as an exchange student. This entailed spending six weeks in a German family with a boy of my own age. When his summer holiday started, he went back with me to Sweden and stayed for the same period of time.
I was placed with a pastor’s family in Thuringen, in a small town called Haina, halfway between Weimar and Eisenach. The town was in a valley and surrounded by prosperous villages. A muddy slow-moving river wound its way between the houses and the town had an outsize church, a market square with a war memorial and a bus station.



 
The family was large, six sons and three daughters, the pastor and his wife, plus an old relative, who was a deaconess or dienende Schwester [serving sister]. She had a moustache, sweated profusely and ruled the family with a rod of iron. The head of the household was a slight man with a goatee beard, friendly blue eyes, tufts of cotton wool in his ears and a black beret pulled low down over his forehead. He was widely read and musical, played several instruments and sang in a soft tenor.
His wife was fat, worn out and submissive; she spent most of her time in the kitchen and patted me shyly on the cheek. Perhaps she was trying to apologize for the house being so humble.





My friend, Hannes, seemed to have been cut out of a National-Socialist propaganda broadsheet, blond, tall and blue-eyed, with a fresh smile, very small ears and the first growth of beard. We made mutual efforts to understand each other, but it was not easy. My German was the result of cramming nothing but grammar, a common practice at the time, when the consideration that a language might possibly be spoken was not part of the curriculum.

 The days were tedious. At seven o’clock in the morning, the children of the house went off to
school and I was left alone with the adults. I read, roamed about and was homesick. I preferred being in the pastor’s study and going with him when he was out visiting in the parish. He drove a ramshackle old car with a high hood, over roads dusty in the still heat and with angry fat geese marching everywhere.

I asked the pastor whether I should raise my arm and say Heil Hitler like all the others. He
replied: ‘Lieber Ingmar, das wird als mehr eine Hoflichkeit betrachtet.’ [My dear Ingmar, that will be regarded as more than mere politeness.] I raised my arm and said ‘Heil Hitler’, and it felt odd.




 After a while, Hannes suggested I should go with him to school and listen in on the lessons.
With a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea, I chose the school, which was in a larger town a few kilometres bicycle ride from Haina. I was received with enthusiastic cordiality and allowed to sit next to Hannes. The classroom was spacious, shabby and rather cold and damp, despite the summer heat outside the tall windows. The subject was Religious Knowledge, but Hitler’s Mein Kampf lay on the desks. The teacher read something out of a paper called Der Stiirmer. I remember only one phrase that seemed peculiar to me. Again and again, he repeated in a factual tone of voice, von den Juden vergiftet [poisoned by the Jews]. I asked later what it meant. Hannes laughed. ‘Acb, Ingmar, das alies ist nicbt fur Auslander.’ [Oh, Ingmar, all that’s not for foreigners.]




On Sundays, the family went to morning service, and the pastor’s sermon was surprising for his text was not from the gospels but from Mein Kampf. After church, coffee was served in the church hall. There were a number of people in uniform, so I had several opportunities to raise my arm and say ‘Hell Hitler’.





All the young people in the house were in organizations, the boys in the Hitler-Jugend, the girls in Bund Deutscher Mddel. There was drilling with spades instead of rifles in the afternoons, or sports at the sports stadium, lectures with film shows in the evenings, or we sang and danced. We could bathe in the river, but with some difficulty, for the river bed was muddy and the water smelly. The girls’ sanitary towels, crocheted out of thick white cotton, hung out to dry in the primitive washroom, which had no hot water or other conveniences.


 
There was to be a party rally in Weimar, a gigantic procession with Hitler to the fore. Everyone bustled around the house; shirts were washed and ironed, boots and straps polished, and the young people set off at dawn. I would go later in the car with the pastor and his wife. The family made quite a fuss about being given tickets near the platform of honour and someone suggested as a joke that my presence might be the reason for their good seats.
 That morning, the telephone rang. It was from home, and far away I could hear Aunt Anna’s
sonorous voice. This expensive call was possible because of her immense wealth. She did not even bother to hurry, but only gradually came to the point. She told me a friend of hers, married to a banker and living in Weimar, had heard from Mother that I was staying nearby, so she had at once telephoned her friend and suggested I should visit the family. Aunt Anna then spoke to the pastor in fluent German, and returned to the conversation with me, pleased that I would be meeting her friend and her lovely children.


 We arrived in Weimar at about midday. The parade and Hitler’s speech were to begin at three o’clock. The town was already seething with excitement, people in their best clothes or uniforms strolling along the streets. Bands were playing everywhere and the houses were hung with garlands of flowers and banners. The church bells, both gloomy Protestant and cheerful Catholic, were ringing, and a big fair had been set up in one of the old squares. They were advertising Wagner’s Rienzi at the Opera House as a gala performance with fireworks afterwards.




 The pastor’s family and I were placed close to the saluting platform. While we were waiting in the sticky heat, we drank beer and ate sandwiches out of the greasy packets the pastor’s wife had clutched to her swelling bosom all through the journey.
 On the stroke of three, we heard something resembling an approaching hurricane, the sombre frightening sound spreading along the streets and resounding off the walls of buildings. Far away in the extension of the square, a procession of open black cars was crawling along. The roaring sound grew louder and drowned the claps of thunder, the rain falling like a transparent curtain and the crashes detonating above the arena.


 No one took the slightest notice of the storm, all attention, all enthusiasm, all this glory
centred on one single figure. He stood quite still in the huge black car slowly swinging into the square. He turned and looked at the cheering weeping obsessed crowds, the rain running down his face and dark patches of moisture appearing on his uniform. Then he stepped slowly down on to the red carpet and walked alone towards the platform, his entourage keeping at a distance. Suddenly silence fell, the rain splashing against the stone-laid streets and balustrades the only sound. The Fuhrer spoke. It was a short speech. I did not understand much, but the voice was sometimes lofty, sometimes bantering, the gestures synchronized and well matched. When the speech was over, everyone shouted his He//, the rain stopped and the hot bright light broke through the blue-black formations of clouds. A huge band played and the parade poured out through the side streets in and across the square round the platform and then on past the theatre and the cathedral.

I had never seen anything like this eruption of immense energy. I shouted like everyone else,
held out my arm like everyone else, howled like everyone else and loved it like everyone else.



 During our nightly conversations, Hannes had explained the Abyssinian war to me, how
important it was that Mussolini was at last paying attention to the natives who toiled in the
darkness, and how he was generously giving them the benefit of ancient Italian culture. He had also said that far away up there in Scandinavia we did not understand how, after the collapse, the Jews had exploited the German people. He explained how the Germans had created a bulwark against communism, and how the Jews had consistently sabotaged this bulwark, and how we must all love the man who had shaped our common destiny and decisively welded us together into one will, one strength, one people. I was given a present by the family on my birthday, a photograph of Hitler. Hannes hung it up above my bed so that I would always have the man before my eyes’, so that I should learn to love him in the same way as Hannes and the Haid family loved him.




I loved him too. For many years, I was on Hitler’s side, delighted by his successes and saddened by his defeats. My brother was one of the founders and organizers of the Swedish National-Socialist party, and my father voted several times for them. Our history teacher worshipped ‘the old Germany’, our gymnastics teacher went to officers’ meetings in Bavaria every summer; some of the pastors in the parish were crypto-Nazis and the family’s closest friends expressed strong sympathies for the ‘new Germany’.

 Taken from :
INGMAR BERGMAN : The Magic Lantern - An Autobiography


 

Thursday, March 26, 2020

Spectres from the Azel's Mountain & The Warcry From Northlands!


OUT OF THE DUNGEON RECORDS 
Presents:

FULLMOON United Aryan Evil CD

 Finally back in CD format one of the most worshipped recordings of Polish black metal underground.
Luciferian Supreme Darkness from the unholy spirits of Azel Mountain. LP version to follow later!

 ALSO DISTRIBUTED:
(Different label release)

BLUT UND EHRE Ygg Vidrir CD 

- Full-lenght album of Esoteric Viking War Black Metal howlings from Arisk winterlands.
Asgardsrei Battle Hymns for the resurrection of Pagan past.
 Sample:


Both CDs available from:



Wednesday, March 25, 2020

Percy Shelley - The Renaissance of Hellas in 1821





 "Hellas" 
by
Percy Shelley

A poem about the Hellenic Revolution of the 25th of March 1821

The world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far.
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.
Another Athens shall arise
And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendour of its prime;
And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.

( Shelley’s Hellas, written in the autumn of 1821 and based on newspaper reports, contains in extreme form the ideas worked on by so many others. It epitomizes the deep sense of personal involvement in the Greek struggle which was so widely felt all over Europe. )


 SEE ALSO:
 

 

Sunday, March 22, 2020

Grim Aural Apocalypse



The Black Death is based on Svartedauen (1900) 
by 
Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914) 
 


Composed 
by 
Lars Pedersen: 
programming, keyboards, harp, cello, percussion, sounds and voices
 
Recorded summer 1992


The album is a sound-journey of the great plague entering and ravishing Norway in 1349, killing two-thirds of the Norwegian population within a few years, reducing an already small population to a bare minimum of survivors. The album was inspired by a series of grim drawings on the subject by Theodor Kittelsen. Kittelsen is one of Norway's most renowned artists, with Svartedauen being his seminal work from the year 1900, a national treasure as instantly recognizable to most Norwegians as Munch's The Scream. Pedersen had the balls to make a soundtrack to it.


Svartedauen is a 38 minute musique concrète sound-collage. In a highly sophisticated manner it mixes elements of manipulated traditional Norwegian folk music (such as the eerie sounding Harding fiddle), with sounds of horses whining, rats gnawing, wood grinding and people moaning.




 But because Svartedauen tackles such a dark subject it is unlike any other musique concrète compositions I know. Pedersen masterly makes us feel the desperation of rural plague-ridden Norway - a sonic maelstrom slowly moving forward towards the inevitable apocalypse. A scary and uncomfortable, yet fascinating listen.




 The Black Death's release just happened to coincide with the Black Metal summer of 1992 and was thus embraced by a generation of young metal artists about to radically change the musical landscape of extreme metal forever. Listening to the album with that in mind it actually makes a lot of sense - Svartedauen incomparably evokes that feeling of doom and medieval dread that the black metal bands were attempting with croaked screams and distorted guitars around the same time.



Friday, March 20, 2020

The Sonic Manifest of Dripping Papal Blood - Napoleon, Pope Pius VI and Nostradamus


Dripping Papal Blood is the secret unreleased second demo
recorded a decade ago in 2010, in the band’s now shuttered ‘the prisoner’s chant…’ studio which rested at ground level across from the oldest cemetery in New York and rumored to be haunted.


This demo brings to life the complex and fierce rivalry between Emperor Napoleon and the Pope Pius VII. Napoleon went as far as to have Pope Pius VII placed in confinement.

Despite the antichrist’s repugnancy of the papacy, Napoleon knew he still needed the symbolic authority of the church during his unprecedented self coronation (referred to by the band as ‘ascension to accipitridae!’ - the classification of predatory birds of prey).


With the appointment of the cruel Cardinal Fesch (a relative of the emperor) after the Antichrist’s coup d’etat of 18 brumaire, Napoleon gave fesch with orders to persuade the pope to attend Napoleon’s coronation,
only later to be stripped of religious power and cast out of the diocese upon defiance of Napoleons inflexible attitude toward the church. Fesch later died in rome surrounded by his masterpiece art collection rumored to be pillaged and later bequeathed in his will.

Always through the lens of Black metal and Nostradamus’ prediction of the arrival of the antichrist,
‘Dripping Papal Blood’ intrudes into the interplay and triple-crossing corruption between Napoleon, the church and his own art plundering family members appointed through nepotism to the diocese.  

YOU CAN LISTEN "Dripping Papal Blood" IN ITS ENTIRETY HERE:



Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Guests from The Past - A Norwegian painter and a Greek Ethnologist





Or
How the art of Theodor Kittelsen goes hand-in-hand with the writtings Nikolaos Politis.

"Plague is a blind woman, that goes around the country, from house to house, and she kills everyone touched by her.
But because she goes with searching, wall to wall, she can`t reach those who stand aside and stay protected in the middle inside of their homes."




"Plague is woman dressed in black. She goes at homes during the night and gives her poisonous breath. Some people say that the houses she entered in are marked, and this mark can`t be removed by anyone."


NIKOLAOS G. POLITIS Traditions (1904)



NOTES:


 The Pics : Pesta - The personification of Black Death done by Norwegian artist Theofor Kittelsen in a series named Svartedauen
Nikolaos G Politis : Master of Hellenic ethnology and folkore. A bio of him HERE

 

Sunday, March 15, 2020

Ritornati dal passato - Italian Cantatas in Times of Coronavirus





The last days, to the news that coming from Italy, amongst others we see several Italians in the cities of Naples, Sienna and Rome singing anthems and patriotic songs from their balconies.

So, lets see of two of them in English. 



 
First one is the English translation of Italian hymn :

Brothers of Italy,
Italy has awakened;
Scipio's helmet
she has put on her head.
Where is the Victory?
Offer her the hair;
because slave of Rome
God created her.
Chorus:
Let us unite!
We are ready to die;
Italy called.
 
We have been for centuries
stamped on, and laughed at,
because we are not one people,
because we are divided.
Let's unite under
one flag, one dream;
To melt together
Already the time has come.
 
Let's unite, let's love;
The union and the love
Reveal to the people
God's ways.
We swear to liberate
the native soil:
United, for God,
Who can beat us?
 
From the Alps to Sicily,
Everywhere is Legnano;
Every man of Ferruccio
has the heart and the hand;
the children of Italy
are called Balilla;
The sound of every church bell
calling for evening prayers.
 
They are branches that bend
the sold swords;
Already the eagle of Austria
has lost its feathers.
the blood of Italy
and the Polish blood
Drank with Cossacks
But its heart was burnt.

 MORE INFO : HERE
 



 Second one is a new set of lyrics written on the anthem of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies
The original anthem is INNO AL RE. The title of the newer lyrics below is

BACK FROM THE PAST

 Let God save you, dear homeland 
that stretches out in this ancient sea of hero
cradle of thought
that, born in Greece
in this land flourished anew
Erased from history
we are once again flying your flags
On the sacred towers of Gaeta
we write again the word: Dignity.

Soldier of the Volturno
you that fell here,
no one for a hundred years
has engraved your name.
The children you never knew
will return honour to you.
 
Back from the past,
those who believe in us this time will win
Go ahead, drummer,
beat like you once did
without luck
but not without courage
Fate that betrayed us
now reunites us.
 
Back from the past
those who believe in us
this time will win.

   MORE INFO HERE


Friday, March 13, 2020

Gothic Art as a Resemblance of Modern Times - The Italian Triumph of Death

Trionfo della Morte (Triumph of Death)
Palermo Italy - 1446 , Artist Unknown

 "The fresco is composed as a large miniature, where in a luxurious garden surrounded by a hedge, Death enters riding a skinny horse. It is portrayed while launching deadly arrows against characters belonging to all the social levels, killing them. The horse occupies the centre of the scene, with its ribs well visible and a scrawny head showing teeth and the tongue. Death has just released an arrow, which has hit a young man in the lower right corner; it is keeping on a side the scythe, its typical attribute.

On the lower part are the corpses of the people previously killed: emperors, popes, bishops, friars (both Franciscans and Dominicans), poets, knights, and maidens. Each character is portrayed differently: some still have a grimace of pain on the face, while others are serene; some have their limbs abandoned on the ground, and others are kneeling down after having been just struck by an arrow. On the left is a group of poor people, invoking Death to stop their suffering, but being ignored. Among them, the figure looking towards the observer has been proposed as a possible self-portrait of the artist.

On the right is the group of the nobles, shown as having no interest in the events, and most of them continuing their activities. They include several musicians, richly dressed noblewomen, and knights with fur clothes, as symbols of life and youth. A man is keeping a hawk on his arm, and another is leading two hounds."

Taken from www.scienceheathen.com



 

Monday, March 9, 2020

The Knight That Met With Death


Farewell to the knight who forsake this mortal coil


MAX VON SYDOW 
(10 April 1929 - 8 March 2020)