In 1963 the Dutch singer and songwriter Jules de Corte released a song titled “Ik zou well eens willen weten” (I would really like to know). The words and music and the wistful way he recorded It made a lasting impression on me. The following are the lyrics or it:
I would really like to know
Why are the mountains so high?
Perhaps to gather the snow
Or to keep the valley from the cold
Or perhaps as a safe support for the arch of the sky
That is why the mountains are so high
I would really like to know
Why are the seas so deep?
Perhaps for the happiness of the fish
Who can hardly do without the water
Or for the greater glory of God who created the world
That is why the seas are so deep
I would really like to know
Why are the clouds so fast?
Perhaps it is a lesson for man
That teaches him how fictitious a boundary is
Or perhaps it is simply an angelic game
That is why the clouds are so fast
I would really like to know
Why are people so tired?
Perhaps from their hunting and chasing
Or perhaps from their ten thousand questions
And they have been on their way to peace for so long
That is why people are so tired
————————
Julius “Jules” de Corte (29 March 1924–16 February 1996) was probably one of the most famous blind singer-songwriters from the Netherlands. I happened to catch a glance of him a few times when he sat behind the piano in his living room when walking by his house on the way to the pub in 1962 when I was stationed on the airbase Ypenberg during my mandatory 2 year military service in the Netherlands
Huguenots (‘les Huguenots Calvinistes’) was the name given to French Protestants who were followers of Jean Calvin (1509-1564), a French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. Breaking with the Roman Catholic Church around 1530, he was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism.
In its opposition to the Roman Catholic Church, Calvinism gained significant popularity particularly among the middle and upper classes of French society. In short, Calvinism was highly critical of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, accusing it of corruption and abuse of church practices, and the Pope of having made a mockery of its sacred mission in the name of Christianity. Not surprisingly, this led to significant hostility on the Catholic side, culminating into the French Wars of Religion between 1562–98 that were primarily fought between French Catholics and Protestants.
This period was also earmarked by a number of massacres in which thousands of French Protestants and their families were brutally killed. The most notorious has been referred to as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 24 August – 3 October 1572, which led to as a many as 25,000 Protestants being killed in Paris. Similar massacres took place in other towns in the weeks following, with nearly 3,000 Protestants slaughtered in Toulouse alone.
The St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of French Protestants on August 25 of 1572Grieving Huguenots seek to comfort the bereaved during the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
Edict of Nantes – 1598
As with most religious disputes, this touched on all areas of society and extended well into the political realm, and included the power struggle between the aristocratic families of France such as the House of Bourbon and the House of Guise. Eventually, peace was introduced in 1598 by Henry IV (1553–1610) from the House of Bourbon through the enactment of the Edict of Nantes, which guaranteed a range of religious freedoms to the Protestants. This didn’t necessarily stop all the hostility towards the Huguenots, and Henry IV – a former Protestant himself – would eventually pay for his efforts to legitimize the Protestant religion when he was assassinated in 1610 by François Ravaillac, a religious fanatic on the Catholic side.
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes – 1685
However, less than a hundred years after its enactment, the Edict of Nantes was revoked in October 1685 by Louis XIV, the grandson of Henry IV, and the Huguenot community would once again become the target of religious persecution. The revocation forbade Protestant services, required education of children as Catholics, and prohibited emigration.
As well, they were forced to recant their protestant faith during mass ceremonies, usually at the local parish church, and sign a statement to that effect.
circa 1760: A Huguenot wedding taking place secretly in a forest. The minister raises his arms in blessing over a young couple. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
These religious conflicts proved disastrous for the Huguenots and costly for France as it nearly bankrupted the country and caused severe, long-term economic damage. It precipitated civil bloodshed, ruined commerce, and while exact numbers are hard to come by –and vary wildly – it has been estimated that perhaps as many as 200,000 Huguenots were forced to leave France since the mid 1500’s to avoid religious persecution.
Huguenots fleeing France
While the majority of French Protestant refugees fled to other European countries where they were free to practice their religion, other significant Huguenot communities were successfully settled as far away as North and South America, and South Africa. Because the vast majority of Huguenots were professionals or trained tradesman, their skills were usually very much demand and allowed them to become quickly integrated into the social and economic life of the communities that had welcomed them.
The Dutch Republic
While under the rule of Spain In1581 the stadholder of the Netherlands – William of Orange – led a rebellion that resulted in the country’s seven most Northern provinces’ seceding from the King of Spain and the creation of the Dutch republic of the United Provinces. Earlier, at age 11 in 1544, William had inherited the Principality of Orange in Southern France. The Principality was incorporated into the holdings of what became the House of Orange. This pitched it into the Protestant side in the French Wars of Religion and as an independent enclave the principality of Orange became an attractive destination for Protestants and a Huguenot stronghold in France.
After an attack on the Dutch republic by Spain’s Louis XIV in 1672, William III of Orange – grandson of William of Orange – emerged as the leading opponent of Louis XIV. This resulted in many Huguenots seeing the wealthy and Calvinist Dutch Republic, as the most attractive country for their exile destination and so it should come as no surprise that following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 between 50,000 and 75,000 Huguenots fled to the Netherlands – then the Dutch Republic – making it the largest single destination for these exiles, accounting for approximately 20% of the entire Huguenot diaspora. The massive influx, which included roughly 400 French-speaking ministers profoundly shaped the local culture, religious landscape and economy of the Dutch republic.
Amsterdam
Around 12,000 Huguenots settled in Amsterdam around the early part of the 18th century, forming approximately 6% of the city’s population. At that time there was already a large and well-established French community centered around the French or Walloon Church; this following the earlier events of 1581 and the declaration of independence by the Seven United Provinces from the King of Spain. This caused many French speaking Calvinist in the Southern Netherlands to flee to the new republic in the North and away from the Spanish rulers in the Southern provinces who were making Roman Catholicism the mandatory state religion there.
The Walloon or French Church in Amsterdam dates from the year 1409. Formerly a chapel of a Roman Catholic a monastery, the building was put at the disposal of the French-speaking protestant refugees from the Southern Netherlands and France when Amsterdam converted to Protestantism shortly after 1578.
Amsterdam and the area of West-Frisia were the first areas providing full citizens rights to Huguenots in 1705, followed by the entire Dutch Republic in 1715. Huguenots married with Dutch from the outset. Many Huguenot descendents in the Netherlands today are recognisable by their French family surnames. Due to their early ties with the Dutch Revolt’s leadership and even participation in the revolt, parts of the Dutch patriciate are of Huguenot descent.
When WW2 ended with the defeat of NAZI Germany in May of 1945 the Allied forces gave in to the Soviet dictator Stalin’s demands to control most of Eastern Europe. This included the German province of East Prussia with its capital city of Königsberg and which gave Stalin something that he dearly wanted: access to a year-round ice-free harbour on the Baltic coast! The city was renamed to Kaliningrad, after one of Stalin’s political puppets, Mikhail Kalinin.
Baltic region showing the location of the Kaliningrad Oblast.
Today Kaliningrad is the administrative centre of Kaliningrad Oblast, an area that became a Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea and geographically separated from the rest of Russia following to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
More that 65 years have go by since the German city of Königsberg became the Russian city of Kaliningrad and one might well ask: how much is left of the original City of Königsberg?
Some people have argued that Kaliningrad is still Königsberg but now under a different name. But that would be true only if one reduces the meaning and substance of a city to a specific location on a map without regard to its origins, historical significance and ethno-cultural makeup.
Here, we clearly do have a tale of two cities, that – while located in the same place – they are different cities in terms of their history, culture and ethnicity, as well as nationality or country that they are located in.
The East Prussian City of Königsberg (1724-1945)
A brief history of Königsberg
The castle of Königsberg was founded in 1255 by the knights of the Teutonic Order in the course of their expansion in the Baltic region. From 1457 onwards it was the residence of the Grand Master of the Order, and the last Grand Master was Prince Albrecht of Brandenburg (1490–1568) who created the world’s first Protestant state in 1525. During the 1286-1327 period the three settlements which had formed round the castle of Königsberg (Altstadt, Löbenicht and Kneiphof) were granted the status of towns. In 1724, they officially merged into the city of Königsberg..
For centuries, Königsberg was the metropolis of eastern Germany. The city played an important role in Europe’s international relations and became a meeting point of diverse historical and cultural traditions. Poles, Lithuanians, English and Dutch; merchants from every European country; artisans and learned men of every nationality not only coexisted peacefully: they also respected each other and together they built up their city. Founded in 1544 as a purely Lutheran place of learning, the Albertina University of Königsberg became the center of attraction for men of science and culture from Poland and Lithuania. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the great philosopher, lived and worked here his entire life. It was in that city that the first-ever books were printed in Lithuanian.
The historical center of Königsberg with an architecture characteristic of the period was formed in the late Middle Ages. This includes the Konigsberg castle – or Schloss – that begun in 1255 and added to later, with a Gothic tower 277 ft. high and a chapel built in 1592. On Kneiphof island the Dom cathedral, a Gothic building of reddish brick, with a tower 164 ft. high begun in 1333 and restored in 1856, it adjoined the tomb of Immanuel Kant, next to the city library, the former University building in which Kant held his lectures. Altogether, there were some 730 historical and cultural monuments in the city which up to 1939 had a population of around 350,000.
Overhead view of Kneiphof Island and the Dom Cathedral
Königsberg was a beautiful, vibrant and prosperous city. It was a world trade centre for optical lenses, and a vital shipping port for the trade in cereals, legumes, timber and flax in Northern and Eastern Europe. Large freighters were able to access its deep sea port by means of an 8 meter deep channel that started at Pillau on the Baltic. Königsberg extensive warehousing district contained some of the largest grain silos on the mainland. As a result arts and commerce flourished here. Grand merchant houses, banking offices, palaces and opera houses were erected in the city centre.
Königsberg in 1939
The destruction of Königsberg
In 1944 Königsberg suffered heavy damage from British air attacks. Bombed earlier by the Soviet Air Forces causing minor damage, the Royal Air Force first attacked the city on the night of 26/27 August 1944. Fortunately for the Königsbergers, this first raid was not successful, most bombs falling on the eastern side of the town.
However, three nights later on the 29/30 August, the RAF carried out one of the most devastating attacks of the war on Königsberg at extreme range. As a result, the city burned for several days and the results were devastating, and in addition to the horrible death that befell thousands of its citizens primarily through incineration, the historic city center, consisting of the quarters Altstadt, Löbenicht and Kneiphof was in fact completely destroyed, among it the Dom cathedral, the castle, all churches of the city, the old and the new university and the entire warehouse district.
Subsequent to the aerial bombardment by the RAF the city would become the target of the Soviet army, when as many as 1,500,000 Soviet troops supported by several thousand tanks and aircraft entered East Prussia in early January of 1945. The Russian assault resulted in the inevitable surrender of the defending German forces on April 9, 1945. By this time as much as 80% of Königsberg appeared to have been destroyed.
The ruins of Königsberg castle in 1950
Out of Königsberg’s prewar population of approximately 350,000 Germans an estimated 42,000 died during the war while many had fled elsewhere to escape the fighting. The remaining population was eventually expelled 500 km westward across Poland to Germany between 1949 and 1950 as part of Stalin’s ethnic cleansing project. After the expulsion Königsberg’s bombed-out remains were repopulated with people from all over the Soviet Union.
The Russian City of Kaliningrad (1945 – present)
Some might still want to claim that Königsberg and Kaliningrad are one and the same city since enough bricks and mortar were left standing to claim a degree of physical continuity between the two to the extent that – if you looked hard enough- you would be able to find enough of the original to justify the claim. But the extent to which the bombed out remains of Königsberg were violated after the Soviets took possession in 1945 – and essentially left to rot until recently, or simply bulldozed away earlier, with the useful bits shipped back to the motherland – the unique and historic City of Königsberg ceased to exist. This was especially true after the last remaining ethnic German was expelled after 1945 to find their way westwards across the distant Oder-Neisse border.
Remains of the DOM Cathedral on Kneiphof Island,
Author Michael Wieck, a Holocaust survivor who grew up in Königsberg and returned in 1992, once wrote that: “Anyone who goes to Kaliningrad today shouldn’t expect to find Königsberg. There is a building here or there that recalls the past, but these leftovers from Königsberg’s existence are like finding bones in a cemetery.”
The following sets of pictures compare the same location in 2005, with roughly 60 years in between.
Rebuilding Königsberg as Kaliningrad
Following the Soviet takeover of Königsberg the new inhabitants – which came from all over the Soviet Union – faced the daunting task of rebuilding the charred remains into the new city of Kaliningrad. This included the inevitable introduction of typical uninspired Stalinist architecture such as the usual drab Soviet-style apartment blocks, further demeaning the tragic fate of the once great City of Königsberg. And since the Kaliningrad Oblast became a strategically important area during the Cold War, Kaliningrad was closed to foreign visitors when the Soviet Baltic Fleet was headquartered there in the 1950s.
The House of Soviets
Dom_Sovetov
Often referred to as the ultimate insult to architecture anywhere, the in 2024 demolished multi-story House of Soviets was built at the site of the destroyed Königsberg Castle. Intended to be the central administration building of the Kaliningrad Oblast, building began in 1970 in the Brutalist style, but it was left unfinished for over 20 years, when the exterior was painted light blue and windows were installed in July of 2005 at the occasion of the 750 year anniversary of the city. However, the interior remains unfinished and unusable and rumour has it that the building is structurally unsound after the discovery that its foundations were built over previously unknown underground caves dating back to the earliest days of the massive Königsberg castle over which ruins it has been built.
750th Anniversary Celebrations
Friday, July 1, 2005 marked the 750th anniversary of the founding of the city of Kaliningrad – and that obviously included the period prior to the Soviet annexation of the former East German homelands! Interestingly, the name Königsberg was not used at an time during the three days of celebrations that included a meeting between Russia’s President Vladimir Putin , German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac.
Restoration and Renewal
The civic rulers of Kaliningrad must be given some credit for wanting to pay respect to the rich architectural history of Königsberg. As recently as 2014 – and as part of a project known as “Heart of the City” – the “Kaliningrad City” Urban District Administration held an Architectural Competition to rebuild Königsberg City Center in the context of regenerating certain aspects of the historical part of the city and its longstanding Prussian heritage.
The Restored Dom Cathedral
It wasn’t until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December of 1992 that work began to reconstruct the cathedral , and in the early 2000s the restoration appears complete. It included a new organ that Vladimir Putin is said have donated the funds for . Apparently, Germany contributed to some of the restoration costs.
The New Synagogue
On the left is the former Jewish Orphanage and all that remained of the adjacent 1896 dedicated Grand New Synagogue after it was destroyed in the Kristallnacht riots of November1938.
Nearly 80 years later, the grand New Synagogue has been rebuilt in 2018 as an exact replica at the very same location adjacent to the former Jewish Orphanage on what was then called Lindenstrasse, but is now Oktyabrskaya Street.
Kaliningrad Today
A few images of present day Kaliningrad showing former central Königsberg sites that have been preserved or restored in their original configuration:
Former Hansaplatz – Now Victory Square (Google Image)Former Luisen Theatre (Google Image)Former Königsberg universityFormer Main Post office (Google Image)Former Police Headquarters (Google Image)
Above the burned-out ruins of the building housing the former Kreuz Apothecary that were left untouched until the late 1990’s when the were incorporated into a new building in 2021 as seen below.
The City of Königsberg is part of history now, its fate largely forgotten if not outright ignored. But even today – and every year since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 – many German expellees or their descendants originally from that ill-fated city and surrounding area undertake a trek back to their former homelands to look for that which was forever taken from them: their place of birth, the history of their families, their culture and communities they grew up in.
Neuroscientists have described the human brain as the most complex biological structure in the known universe, containing hundreds of billions of cells, and trillions of connections controlling every thought, feeling, movement and function of our bodies.
If this proves anything, it would be the fact that – outside of explanations invoking religious mythology – the evolution of matter was able to bring something as intricate and organizationally complex as the human brain about through a teleological process that appears to be internal to it.
And when I say “internal” I mean this in the sense that the drive to evolve is a property of the material universe that will manifest itself in the presence of conditions that would allow for it.
As such evolution utilizes the seemingly randomness of cosmic events to arrive at ever higher levels of organizational complexity through a process of trial and error to find the required material stability and biological survivability that would allow it to achieve its desired objective, whatever that might be.
In that context I see the arrival of the human species as the introduction of a critical transitional period and the next phase of cosmic evolution that pushes life beyond the mere acts of survival and propagation, and allowing it to venture further into the realm of consciousness and expanding its content in terms of knowledge and ideas.
Homo Sapiens straddles the Past and the Future. What I am referring to here is our species’ precarious status as a creature that has one leg still firmly in the animal kingdom – our past – while the other is in a future we know little or anything about. And so we are acting accordingly, with no clear idea of what is expected of us, making us inherently unpredictable if not an unstable life form at best, as evidenced by its self-destructive tendencies, including suicide, homicide, genocide, and undermining its own life-sustaining environment.
But there is one type of human activity where we have clearly gone beyond our animal traits and can claim some considerable accomplishments since our arrival as a brand new species: the areas of science and technology. Our successes on this front may well be proof that our relatively recent arrival on the cosmic scene constitutes the transition of matter’s evolutionary prowess from a strictly internal process to an external one as we apply our sciences and technologies to just about all aspects of our material existence.
We can point to the ingenuity of our species to manipulate and restructure aspects of our material reality into ever increasing levels of organizational complexity, such that – through us – the cosmos, nature, life – has achieved a quantum leap in creative productivity and is now able to push its evolutionary objectives – whatever they may be – over significantly shorter time frames. In this sense, human beings function as nature’s evolutionary agents and enablers, pushing these objectives along an ever increasing pace for no other reason than that it seems to be the natural thing to do …
Life’s larger context is defined, in the first place, by our ideas about our place in the world provided we see it in in terms of being intrinsically linked to everything else that is going on in it. Consequently, our true human potential will never be realized unless we start taking our cue from the larger context of existence as it is being manifested by our daily experience of it.
The challenge here will be to translate these experiences into a language that allows the larger context to emerge so that it can be articulated and inspire us to create a destiny for ourselves that does justice to the effort that has gone into the making of us.
This effort is not easily understood – and if we even understood just the tiniest fraction of it I’m not so sure we would be much further ahead in gaining an insight into the larger picture. No doubt I will be writing more about that in a future piece …
For now we describe our arrival here on earth in terms of an evolutionary process over billions of years. Nothing is explained in terms of why or how or where this process is heading for, and so we are left with a mystery. Being at the receiving end of this process, we can look back to some extent and infer that apparently this has been about the gradual enablement of what we call “consciousness”, and achieved by the development of ever more complex organizational structures within matter, reaching its current summit in the grey matter of our brains. Now what?
The one thing that this did bring about was the transition of life’s apparently intrinsic evolutionary pressures from a strictly internal process over billions of years to an external one, as evidenced by the ingenuity of our species to manipulate and restructure matter into ever increasing organizational complexity as reflected by the various aspects of technology that we are familiar with today. Through us, nature has achieved a quantum leap in the creativity department, now being able to push its evolutionary objectives over significantly shorter time frames. In this sense, human beings function as nature’s evolutionary agents, pushing these objectives along at a breakneck speed for no other reason than that it seems to be the natural thing to do …
Smart enough to move it along, yet not smart enough to know why, and that is probably a wise thing as far as nature is concerned, given our tendency to self-destruct, a function of being an intermediate, transitional and demonstratively unstable life-form, schizoid, capable of being both intellectually brilliant and emotionally brittle, or logical and illogical, and the latter most likely caused by that aspect of ourselves that is still very much the predatory, primitive beast in the field that we descent from.
Much of what I am trying to do here is to get to the story behind the story, i.e., to get a glimpse of the greater context of what plays itself out every day as what we refer to as “life” or “living”. It is based on the assumption there must be more to life than what I, you or for that matter anyone else might have experienced in a lifetime, regardless of what that may have included.
So what would be the grounds for such assumption when I seem to say that the basis for it is outside life’s experiential realm? To get a sense of what I’m hinting at is a little bit like what the character Morpheus says to Thomas A. Anderson, AKA “Neo” and the protagonist in the excellent 1999 Sci-Fi movie Matrix: You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world.
Now I realize that this might be an understatement for some, but here I’m not talking about all the really bad things that are happening in the world today (and have more or less always happened in the world of yesterday) and an astonishing human tragedy by any other name given all the calamities, war, religious strife, murder and mayhem and what have you, but the fact that regardless of the nature of the event – good or bad – it remains a mystery why any of it actually needs to take place, i.e., what in the world is playing itself out here?
In short, I am saying that life, living, doesn’t add up … at least not for me, and while that might just be my problem, I think not. I suggest we are seeing only part of the script here.
This has to do with the fact that you cannot make sense of something existing for its own sake. I know, some will say something equally nonsensical, like “it is what it is”, but trying to make sense of apparent nonsense is one of my interests, especially when there appears to be so much of it, such as a whole universe of it.
So when I say that it doesn’t add up, I mean to say that I have never come across the reason as to why we are here, on this planet, in this universe, or the reasons why life is the way it is to the extent that we are challenged by it on a daily basis.
Sure, science will give you a hand full of reasons as to why the world is the way it is, but these are descriptive accounts that assume the world as a given without any further justification for it being there in the first place. When it comes to life, similarly – and discounting religious nonsense of any kind – the answer to the question “why are we here” is lacking also.
And so, in whatever way you look at it, the world – life – appears to be more of a solution in search of a problem, i.e., we don’t have the whole story. And unless there is something more going on than what meets the eye, i.e., what we must confront on a daily basis, the world and everything that can be found in it appears to make no sense at all. At least not for the present …
Life is a metaphor and living it tells us what the cosmos is all about. The problem is, we don’t really know what is going on, but are forced to act out what is at stake here by our very presence in it. Look around you: are we bewildered, or what?
But make no mistake about this: we are the cosmos – every single atom in it is represented in our being and embody its greatest accomplishment, the capacity for reflection and rational thought. Unfortunately – in the case of the latter – we still have a lot to overcome, such as religion by any other name.
And make no mistake about this either: Religion will destroy us if we don’t keep it in check, and to allow itself to burn out due to the lack of substance at its core, e.g., what is happening to Christianity today. There, for all intents and purposes, God is dead, although many still cower in his fading shadow as they continue to partake in its empty rituals. But for the other religions – such as manifested by the primitive, tribal and sometimes deadly Muslim hordes – they must be kept at bay by all means possible.
Clearly, the weapon of choice must be education, to allow for the development of critical thought by the individual. Only then can we all take part in the debate about what this cosmic metaphor is all about, and begin to live life to its full potential, free from suffocating self-denying religious dogma and the vestiges of a superstitious past that has held us back way to long.
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled against the use of crucifixes in classrooms in Italy. It said the practice violated the right of parents to educate their children as they saw fit, and ran counter to the child’s right to freedom of religion.
As expected, the Vatican objected vigorously – no doubt seeing this as an encroachment on their corporate mandate – if not very lucrative business that continues to milk its customers with the promise they are able to save their sinful souls from being condemned and dragged off to hell. ( Where is that place, anyway?)
A Vatican spokesman told Italian TV: The crucifix has always been a sign of God’s love, unity and hospitality to all humanity.
Well, with respect to that particular statement – and in particular the reference to God’s love – one might well want to take a good look at a crucifix. It seems to me it seems to depict the horrible suffering and barbaric death of an individual nailed to a wooden cross.
How could anything so cruel and abhorrent be central to any religion where the subject in question is supposed to be the son of an all powerful deity, and “a loving God”? Obviously his love does no extend to his own son since what father would have allowed his own son to suffer such a savage and excruciatingly painful death while supposedly having the power to stop it at any time?
And so the real question is: how could God have allowed this to happen? The answer is – as Nietzsche put it once ” downright terrifying in it’s absurdity: God gave his Son for the forgiveness of sins, as a sacrifice. The guilt sacrifice, and that in its most repulsive and barbaric form, the sacrifice of the innocent man for the sins the guilty! What atrocious paganism!”
I guess for some folks the Dark Ages clearly aren’t over yet as they continue put their faith in this bizarre tale of human sacrifice and the baroque and antiquated institution that perpetuates this kind of barbaric pagan mythology.
” … Some are born posthumously.” This is Nietzsche’s way of saying that he has looked beyond the current wretched condition of humanity and is anticipating the arrival of an enlightened being who represents a new and superior iteration of the human race. For this to happen, he claims, we must be: “superior to mankind in force, in loftiness of soul – in contempt … “
Much has been made of Nietzsche’s concept of a superior human being – the Übermensch – but apart from being completely misunderstood and maliciously misappropriated by Hitler’s Nazi scum in the previous century – this is the future human being that will be able to rise above the present human condition. He will have overcome it in the sense of no longer being taken down constantly by all the human frailties that continue to threaten our extinction as a species: essentially endless everything – endless greed, lust for blood, consumption, exploitation, gratification, debauchery, procreation, stupidity, superstition. In short (!) everything that, as per our exceedingly well documented history, defines us as the immature, confused and seemingly self-destructive species we are so familiar with today.
The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of any thermodynamically isolated system not at thermodynamic equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value, at which point the universe – as we know it – will cease to exist.
Here I picture the universe as a fantastic fireworks display, initiated by “the big bang”, that lights up the night’s sky with incredible brilliance, but only to eventually disperse itself into dying embers as it spreads out further and further across the darkening sky, and leaving only darkness behind.
However, there are some places in the universe where this process isn’t necessarily being hurried along so much. If you accept the premise that under conditions such as found here on earth matter appears to have the capacity to evolve into higher levels of organization when conditions allow for it – atoms will gather into molecules, molecules into compounds, compounds in to cells, cells into organism – it is at once a level of defense against entropy as well as an opportunity to reach even higher levels of organization .
This leaves alone the question of how or why this capacity exists, but I would assume the answer to it is gradually being expressed in life’s evolutionary tract and will be clear only after it has reached its destination whatever that may be. I presume we’re just a stop along the way, but it is a race against time by any other name.
In 1963 the Dutch singer and songwriter Jules de Corte released a song titled “Ik zou well eens willen weten” (I would really like to know). The words and music and the wistful way he recorded It made a lasting impression on me. The following are the lyrics or it:
Huguenots (‘les Huguenots Calvinistes’) was the name given to French Protestants who were followers of Jean Calvin (1509-1564), a French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. Breaking with the Roman Catholic Church around 1530, he was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism.
While under the rule of Spain In1581 the stadholder of the Netherlands – William of Orange – led a rebellion that resulted in the country’s seven most Northern provinces’ seceding from the King of Spain and the creation of the Dutch republic of the United Provinces. Earlier, at age 11 in 1544, William had inherited the Principality of Orange in Southern France. The Principality was incorporated into the holdings of what became the House of Orange. This pitched it into the Protestant side in the French Wars of Religion and as an independent enclave the principality of Orange became an attractive destination for Protestants and a Huguenot stronghold in France.
The Walloon or French Church in Amsterdam dates from the year 1409. Formerly a chapel of a Roman Catholic a monastery, the building was put at the disposal of the French-speaking protestant refugees from the Southern Netherlands and France when Amsterdam converted to Protestantism shortly after 1578.
For centuries, Königsberg was the metropolis of eastern Germany. The city played an important role in Europe’s international relations and became a meeting point of diverse historical and cultural traditions. Poles, Lithuanians, English and Dutch; merchants from every European country; artisans and learned men of every nationality not only coexisted peacefully: they also respected each other and together they built up their city. Founded in 1544 as a purely Lutheran place of learning, the Albertina University of Königsberg became the center of attraction for men of science and culture from Poland and Lithuania. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), the great philosopher, lived and worked here his entire life. It was in that city that the first-ever books were printed in Lithuanian.
Friday, July 1, 2005 marked the 750th anniversary of the founding of the city of Kaliningrad – and that obviously included the period prior to the Soviet annexation of the former East German homelands! Interestingly, the name Königsberg was not used at an time during the three days of celebrations that included a meeting between Russia’s President Vladimir Putin , German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac.
