Welcome to the life of Oscar Wilde

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Tanya Josefowitz and Anne Frank at 90. A Life of Resistance

An exhibition of posters prepared by classes 9b (Anne Frank) and 10b (Tanya Josefowitz) is going to open in the arts building at Ulrichsgymnasium Norden on 8th May 2019. The opening ceremony is at 3.30 p.m. in Room F03, at Fräuleinshof, Norden. Frau Elke Scheiner, the initiator of the project and personal friend of Tanya Josefowitz is going to read passages from the memoir in German. Thereafter, the exhibition is open Monday to Friday to 24th May with special events to be announced for 17th May and for 12th June, the 90th birthday of either Tanya Josefowitz or Anne Frank.

 

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Wild(e) Ideas on Brexit Vote Day Three

 

Dear readers of my blog,

returning from Marseilles on Sunday last, where I had attended the spring conference of the Relais de la Mémoire, I had just a little bit of respite, staying at home for merely one or two hours more, only to learn the next day that my early train had been cancelled. This piece of news from one of the regular commuters to Norden immediately brought back the main hitch of our journey to the Mediterranean. We were only fifteen minutes late in Frankfort for the TGV to Marseilles, and at the information desk a friendly lady told us that we would be held up in Lyons that evening – only two hours by TGV from Marseilles!

We had not anticipated such an adventure, while having been kept in the dark by the very unfriendly conductor on the train to Frankfort about “such internal matters” not concerning the traveller as catching

 

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Wilde, Josefowitz, John Bercow

 

Dear readers of my blog,

today I am writing my new post on the eve of a trip to Marseilles. As some of you may know my bread-winning job is teaching modern languages at a Gymnasium in East Frisia, which is in the North-Western pocket of Germany just facing the Netherlands. So whenever we travel South, we start off at the North Sea and don't stop until we have reached the Mediterranean, covering about 1,600 km in the process and linking our school with three Lycées at Marseilles plus several others from Paris, Tournai, Vienna and one grammar school from Newcastle. This is the last pre-Brexit meeting of the organisation called Relai de la Mémoire Junior, originally founded in 1989 by survivors of the Shoah and former deportees and resistance fighters to keep alive the memory of the atrocities committed in the Second World War.

As it happens, both Oscar Wilde, the main topic of this blog and website, and Tanya Josefowitz, the Jewish lady I have been writing about lately in my posts, also pass on memories of traumatic experiences. And like John Bercow, the current very controversial Speaker of the House of Commons, Wilde and Josefowitz like to be witty, too.

 

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Tanya Josefowitz, "I Remember" read in terms of Oscar Wilde

7th March 2019

Dear readers of my blog,

while teaching writing various text types to my students – no matter whether in English, French, or German – I consider writing myself quite a challenge since it means to negotiate between what I regard as essential for adolescents who need to write for “marks” or “credits” and what I feel imperative to do once writing needs to pass the “reality test”. In writing a blog, I am glad to notice that not all bloggers keep addressing their audience throughout the entry, and that there are also quite sober ways of talking to the readers on the Internet.

Today I begin by publishing a poem based on a research into the words following that of “translator” in an English dictionary which I wrote when I was still recovering from two years of immersion into the world of Oscar Wilde. Here it is:

 

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Tanya Josefowitz, I Remember

 

Welcome to my blog,

Writing post-Holocaust remembrance day, after the 27th of January, that is, I only need to mention that this year, at Leer, the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 was devoted to gay men whom the National-Socialists as of 1935 had totally criminalized. So Oscar Wilde’s predicament is present among us even if he died already in 1900. Having just completed the translation into English of biographical sketches of detainees held in Esterwegen and other Emsland Concentration and Convicts’ Camps between 1933 and 1945, I was reminded more than once of Oscar Wilde – in particular since the men detained for that reason were not prominent at. Unlike Wilde, or, the Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1936, Carl von Ossietzky, they had no-one to “talk about them”. At the same time, Wilde’s prison writings are a constant reminder of what literature can do. It is in this vein that I want to introduce another book which has now arrived at the production stage.

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Classical Music as a peaceful political programme

Welcome to my blog,

little did I imagine before that without adding too many extra pages to my website that I would start, within a few months of beginning this adventure, to unfold many of my interests that I have only had the chance to develop in the criticism section of Irland Almanach. This was an annual I co-edited with four German friends which from 1999 through 2002 portrayed things Irish in German but which the publishers for lack of funds sadly discontinued after the fourth isssue entitled "The Celtic Tiger". One aspect we dealt with was music of all kinds, in my case classical music. So I had been looking forward to a concert at Leer, East Frisia, for some months in which Andrew Manze was to conduct the Radiophilharmonic Orchestra Hanover in a programme with Beethoven, Brahms, the violin concerto, and the Fifth Symphony in D-Major by Ralph Vaughan-Williams. I had hoped for a festival, and I was not deceived. However, in the context both of this blog and the current crisis in the British Isles the concert told me another story, too, which I'd like to unfold now if you care to follow me here.

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Wildes Hauptwerk

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"Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray"

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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