Saxon Switzerland Quotes

Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window was among the paintings rescued from destruction during the bombing of Dresden in World War II, The painting was stored, with other works of art, in a tunnel in Saxon, Switzerland; when the Red Army encountered them, they took them. The Soviets portrayed this as an act of rescue; some others as an act of plunder. Either way, after the death of Joseph Stalin, the Soviets decided in 1955 to return the art to Germany, “for the purpose of strengthening and furthering the progress of friendship between the Soviet and German peoples.” Aggrieved at the thought of losing hundreds of paintings, art historians and museum curators in the Soviet Union suggested that “in acknowledgment for saving and returning the world-famous treasures of the Dresden Gallery” the Germans should perhaps donate to them Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window and Sleeping Venus by Giorgione. The Germans did not take to the idea, and the painting was returned. Well-preserved, it is on display at the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden.

We find the mouse again in the Saxon traditions of the Wartheland, Mecklenburg, and Bohemia. It is sometimes red (Thuringe), according to a testimony that dates from 1661. In the Baltic countries and in Upper Harz, the alter ego is a scarab or a dung beetle. In Switzerland and Wartheland it is a bumblebee, and in Prussia, a cat. Along the lower stretches of the Sieg it is a toad; in Wurtemberg, a bird; a spider in Swabia; in Transylvania, a fly. Nonanimal forms remain rarities: In Switzerland, mention of a light is sometimes made; in the ancient duchy of Oldenburg, there is reference to smoke, which recalls kapnos (smoke), which the Greeks sometimes used as a synonym of psuchè and which must be connected to the whirlwinds that devastated the fields and in Estonia were thought to be witches to such a degree that the peasants dared not stab at them with their pitchforks.

Other post-Roman ethnolinguistic frontiers followed the same pattern. After the fall of Rome German speakers moved into the northern cantons of Switzerland, and the Gallic kingdom of Burgundy occupied what had been Gallo-Roman western Switzerland. The frontier between them still separates ecologically similar regions within a single modern state that differ in language (German-French), religion (Protestant-Catholic), architecture, the size and organization of landholdings, and the nature of the agricultural economy. Another post-Roman migration created the Breton/French frontier across the base of the peninsula of Brittany, after Romano-Celts migrated to Brittany from western Britain around 400–600 CE, fleeing the Anglo-Saxons. For more than fifteen hundred years the Celtic-speaking Bretons have remained distinct from their French-speaking neighbors in rituals, dress, music, and cuisine. Finally, migrations around 900–1000 CE brought German speakers into what is now northeastern Italy, where the persistent frontier between Germans and Romance speakers inside Italy was studied by Eric Wolf and John Cole in the 1960s. Although in this case both cultures were Catholic Christians, after a thousand years they still maintained different languages, house types, settlement organizations, land tenure and inheritance systems, attitudes toward authority and cooperation, and quite unfavorable stereotypes of each other. In all these cases documents and inscriptions show that the ethnolinguistic oppositions were not recent or invented but deeply historical and persistent.