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Summer Blog Post Ten

Summer Blog Post Ten

Dear readers of my blog,

today is “Bloomsday”, now universally celebrated by fans of James Joyce's novel Ulysses as the festival of a single day in the Dublin of 1904. Eighteen years ago, I was invited to speak to an audience at Nuremberg about the third chapter, entitled “Proteus”. Then, I still travelled from Münster in Westphalia to whatever haunts I was asked to share with readers of James Joyce. At the time, I had already realized that this period of my life was running out of steam for I earned hardly anything from the proceeds of my pen as translator and writer of biographies – the first one of which on Oscar Wilde had been published in September 2000. So the contact with Maria Eger at Nuremberg started by a phone call of hers some time earlier was rewarding in the sense that I felt my hobby-horse was going to remain one in the future and that I would not be obliged to toe the academic as well as the commercial line for much longer.

Exhilarated by the perspective of doing what I wanted to do, I also wrote a poem to introduce my talk. Here it is: To this day most of my occasional poems have not seen the light of day, while a blog provides me with a good opportunity to combine literary interests in Wilde and Joyce as well as others such as politics and football.

 

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Summer Blog Post Nine

Summer Blog Post Nine

Dear readers of my blog,

as you can see when typing in https://site.unibo.it/wetell-school, there is an interesting summer school about storytelling as an important impulse to create civic awareness which is going to take place at Bologna University in early July. As an active teacher of modern languages, I often revert to telling stories, most of them experienced myself, in order to catch students' attention, particularly when they are too young to understand abstract concepts such as civic responsibility, awareness and difficult lessons to be learned from history.

Both Oscar Wilde, the main subject of this blog, and Tanya Josefowitz as well as Anne Frank tell stories rather than spread their word in terms of theories. Even when addressing theoretical subjects Wilde more often than not uses the literary form of a dialogue with fictitious characters to tell the story he has in mind.

 

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Summer Blog Post Eight

Dear readers of my blog,

returning late on Wednesday evening after an extremely long day at Ulrichsgymnasium Norden, I had hoped to relax on day one after Anne Frank's 90th birthday. The opposite was the case, since a day filled with meetings including the odd one with some of my students who had just received their matriculation results made it difficult to stop thinking about the day and the last two years spent with about thirty-five of this year's graduates. And while one student said that Anne Frank was just one witness to her, others who had accompanied groups to see the travelling exhibition two years ago saw her as the symbol of resistance she still is today.

 

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Summer Blog Post Seven

Summer Blog Post Seven

Dear readers of my blog,

yesterday, I also discovered that for decades a friend of Anne Frank, Laureen Nussbaum, that is, had fought for the publication of the diary in the form Anne Frank had herself re-written it in, rather than in the collation prepared by Otto Frank. In a sense, he had censored his daughter's work by mixing the two versions. At the moment, I can only speculate about the new translation, while my own impression of the German used in the collated edition is that it is much too flowery. But I say this on the basis of having compared two or three pages of the German with the very terse English text I read the whole diary in.

 

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Summer Blog Post Six

Dear readers of my blog,

writing on the 90th birthday of Anne Frank who died in Bergen-Belsen, Lower Saxony, in February or March 1945, it is not difficult to establish a relationship with Oscar Wilde – though many of the multitude of her readers might not know yet why.

I was quite excited on discovering the following quotations and have been looking forward to introduce Anne Frank into this blog for some time. Maybe you are surprised, too.

Starting on 1st July 1944, roughly 75 years ago, that is, Anne noted some excerpt from “An Ideal Husband” in her “Book of Beautiful Sentences” which is included in the “Complete Works” but not in the diary as translated into English, for example.

 

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Summer Blog Post Five

 

Dear readers of my blog,

writing up on ongoing football events, while professional obligations – picking up the loose threads at the end of the school year as well as awarding prizes or waiting for possible oral exams – concern certain administrative tasks – is not an easy job when the main topic is supposed to be Oscar Wilde. All the same, you can always try to think about the Irishman's work in terms of current events. On Whit Monday, for example, I tried to rethink the ending of my preface to the essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism” in the sense of Irish history from Wilde's lifetime to the present day crisis. This is all the more useful as the current crisis of the United Kingdom touches both Ireland as a whole and the European Union. I like to play with figure, so that the very last sentence I noted runs as follows: “It is since 2016 at the very latest that the Irish know why they once joined the EU, and facing twenty-six other European states united behind the Republic of Ireland, British politicians should have learned by now that this situation is highly symbolic of what is going to happen sooner or later: the twenty-six counties of Ireland will one day be re-united!”

 

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Wildes Hauptwerk

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Über mich

Jörg W. Rademacher (*1962), born and bred in Westphalia. Attended university at Münster, Dundee and Lille. State exam in 1988. Ph.D. In 1993. Scholar, language teacher as well as writer and translator at Münster until 2002. Since 2002 secondary school teacher, writer and translator in East Frisia. Working on Wilde since 1988. Publishing on Wilde since 2000 as biographer and editor and translator, on a regular basis with Elsinor Verlag since 2012, since 2015 also editor and translator of Oscar Wilde calendars.

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