Bonn Voyage: Beethoviana, or How I Became a Real Live Historian in a Single Day

There is a simple flaw in my archival-research-blog plan.

I'm not permitted to take pictures in the archive, and while I can pay for scans for my own private research use, I am strictly forbidden to publish any images of documents from the archive. This means that I'll have to use the thousand words, rather than the pictures, in my accounts of my findings in the archive, which simply means the blog will look less exciting.

Over the course of the last two days, I have transformed from a fake wannabe historian to some faint semblance of a real historian. I feel like I've undergone a coming-of-age ritual, albeit an easier ritual than some. Here's what happened:

I first visited the Beethoven museum itself, a series of rooms in Beethoven's birth-house that are filled with portraits, letters, books, instruments Beethoven played, Beethoven's own belongings from his writing desk, and one of the thirteen extant locks of Beethoven's hair.

The storefront window of the Beethoven museum.  Knickknacks, a bust, and... koi?

The doors of Beethoven's birthplace.

Beethoven graffiti next door.

Apparently it's expressing an edgy message. The column next to this one has the same words, but only the banana.

The museum itself was interesting (and sadly, no photographs allowed, so only descriptions from here)... but I'll admit that these kinds of museums have a tendency to be somewhat dull. If you buy the audio tour, you end up listening to 4 minutes of biographical information about Neefe while standing in front of Neefe's portrait -- then multiply that by all the portraits and objects and rooms in the museum, and you get information overload without a sense of why that information is interesting or valuable. Perhaps my experience was also dampened by the churning sea of 100 British schoolchildren who were visiting the museum that same day.

The point at which I started nerding out was the room filled with Beethoven relics and curios, like the lock of hair. I reached my own personal nerd overload in the special exhibit of the Carrino collection, in which a present-day Italian collector has ammassed hundreds of items of Beethoven-kitsch, souvenirs, coins, stamps, postcards, and weird allegorical images (bascially visual Beethoven fan-fic). I pored over every object in the exhibit, and came up with a number of recurring visual tropes that I've noticed in kitschy Beethoven images:

1) Beethoven's face, usually his life mask from 1812, emerges from the darkness.
2) Specifically, this face emerging from the darkness above a female pianist or male violinist.
3) A naked couple embraces somewhere in the vicinity of Beethoven's life-mask-face, in one instance entangled in his wild mane. No joke.

The question is where these traditions of depicting Beethoven in popular images originated and how they became so standardized.

After my trip to the museum, I went to the archive next door, then spent two hours yammering about my project in German, while several archivists -- all of whom are extremely friendly and helpful -- gradually piled book after book and document after document on the table in front of me.

Since then, I spent the last day and a half reading for hours and hours. But I didn't feel like a real historian until I looked at the Beethoven-Haus's very first guestbook from 1890. (The first entry was of course by  Joseph Joachim, the famed violinist and the museum's founder.) Unlike guestbooks today, people didn't write long messages, but simply signed their names, wrote the date, and wrote city of origin. Many of them only signed their names, nothing else. Even so, the guestbook was fascinating to look at. Within the first year of the museum, the majority of the visitors were from Germany, and many of them from Bonn and nearby Cologne. After the museum's first year, however, the foreign visitors overtook the locals, with visitors flooding in from England, the U.S., and various central European countries (but strangely, few Eastern-European or Mediterranean visitors until much later). Eventually, a decade later, visitors start to trickle in from Australia, Brazil, Calcutta, Japan. Although messages are rare in the guestbooks, there were nonetheless a number of little messages, poems, and tiny excerpts of music, all of which I scanned.

I also read through the museum's old guides, in which every item in the museum is explained in detail. Beethoven's various belongings weren't on display in the original museum, which was mostly portraits, letters and music sketches (albeit with three different locks of hair). But ten years later, the museum acquired its present-day collection of Beethoven's personal desk items, and put these on display, alongside a landscape made out of Beethoven's hair. Seriously.

Meanwhile, I've been on another Harry Potter kick (i.e. re-reading all the books and re-watching all the movies) and thus I'm weirdly interpreting my entire experience through Harry-Potter-related metaphors. This should be an entry of its own.

I haven't taken many pictures of Bonn because it's been raining nonstop. But here are a few:

One of the downtown squares.

The Beethoven monument from 1845, complete with loiterers in red pants.

Looking very stern.

The monument from the back, overlooking the church.

Everything's a little different in Germany.

... well, not quite everything.

Crash Landing; Zombie Roamings; Journey Along the Rhine

It's the middle of the night on an airplane from Philadelphia to Frankfurt. The lights are off, the plane is quiet. The boisterous and exceedingly smelly Austrian couple sitting next to me have fallen asleep at odd angles. Only a few passengers are still awake, flipping through the complimentary TV with a thin line of spittle hanging from their chins. Alas, still brimming with anxiety about my trip to Germany and the archival and academic pressures that await, I am one of those passengers. Over the course of those seven hours, I:

1) Chatted with the Austrians, whose accent I found nearly unintelligible, and about whom I felt deeply conflicted given the combination of their extreme friendliness and awful B.O.

2) Alternated between futile attempts at sleep and watching Avatar for the third time, a film that I'm supposed to dislike for its stereotyped Pocahontas-like depiction of Native Americans and its predictable plot, but that I secretly love

3) Stared into space like a Zombie, unable to accept the fact that the neck pillow I bought is actually less comfortable than no neck pillow

I arrived in Frankfurt not having slept for a minute, and forced myself to stay awake for the next 12 hours. A sage traveler's tip: if you need to force yourself to stay awake, don't spend your entire afternoon at the Botanic Garden. 

Lake with paddleboats: 5 minutes sleep

Tunnel under waterfall: strongly considered curling up to sleep but noticed proliferation of spiders.

Greenhouse: no benches. Left abruptly.

What ended up happening is that I was too exhausted to walk around, so I moved from bench to bench throughout the garden for a period of four hours, falling asleep with my head on my hand, all the while feeling perteptually paranoid that someone would see me sleeping and chase me out with a broom shouting Pennerin! Pennerin! I couldn't enjoy the flowers because I was so busy hunting for a bench where no one would pass by, so that I could actually lie down, and finally found one, only to be prodded awake by a gardener. There was one desperate moment when I strongly considered clambering into a patch of bamboo forest and sleeping on a bed of leaves.

Staying awake was a little easier in the old downtown Römer square.

Super cute square!

Just want to pinch little Frankiefurt's cheekies.

Though of course it didn't help that the weather was dark, gloomy, rainy and cold, as every day has been since I got here. Sommer, wo bist du?

After a night with my friendly and generous hosts in Frankfurt, I boarded the train for Bonn. The train curves along the Rhine, passing by cheek-pinchy little towns, steep farms carved into the mountainsides, and on several occasions, medieval castles on the mountaintop overlooking the town below. (It was hard to tell whether the castles were actually medieval, or the fake-medieval that was a favorite in 19th century Germany.)

The Rhine curves.

Little towns.

It's a castle.

Agriculture! (Night on bald mountain?)

Eventually I made it to Bonn, which will have its own series of entries.

Things I learned:
1) Alcohol is much cheaper in Germany: a good bottle of local white wine can cost only a few euros
2) Coffee is much more expensive in Germany: a simple cup of black coffee usually costs 2-3 euros, which is the equivalent of 3-4 dollars
3) When adapting to a new time zone, just give in and buy the damn coffee.

Death by Kurrentschrift

Let's see, what am I missing... I stuffed the last box of clothes into the closet that the subletter will hopefully never enter, I chased dust bunnies around the underside of the bed with a broom, I bought my rail pass, I skimmed the article I received by e-mail from a super hip German prof, I borrowed ein deutsches Handy from a friend and archival research guru, I printed out maps of Bonn, Berlin, Salzburg, Leipzig, and Frankfurt and noted down vegetarian restaurants from Happy Cow, I made a giant list of items I want to see in the archives which is probably the first thing I should have done six months ago, I found hosts on Airbnb, I set up daunting meetings with nine German professors three archivists and two frighteningly prestigious heads of archives, I meticulously planned out two of those fourteen meetings, I gave the cat to a friend for the summer, I cleaned out the fridge, I packed and unpacked and re-packed and finally über-unpacked a pair of heels, I played the piano for 2.5 minutes because I couldn't sit still long enough, I bought a scheduler, I wrote an abstract of my dissertation and then translated it into German, I printed out five copies of a fancy letter my advisor wrote that makes me seem like I know what I'm doing, I bought eight pairs of white cotton gloves, I picked up my prescriptions, I ordered a locking security box to keep my cash and then realized that it's too heavy and returned it at a UPS drop-off, I friended a German person on Facebook, and I topped up my transit card so that I can make it to O'Hare the day after tomorrow.

...OK. Apart from needing to plan out the other twelve meetings, I think I'm almost ready to go. Now I can start getting excited about the actual substance of my trip -- visiting archives in Germany and Austria for five weeks in preparation for writing my dissertation, meeting professors and making contacts, and exploring five cities (four of which are new to me). Now I can start gearing up to find amazing documents about popular reception and veneration of Beethoven in the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, or probing through the 19th-century history of the Salzburg Mozart-Geburtshaus as an intersection between tourism and pilgrimage. Now the real fun begins.

So what kinds of things will I look at? Fortunately, a lot of the Beethoven-Haus's collections are digitized on their website, so I can take a sneak peek [also known as what I should have been doing six months ago].

Let's see... ooh! A poem called "Beethovens Tod" (Beethoven's Death, for my non-German-reading-readers). Let's check that one out.

... that says "Beethoven"? 

Wait...

"... Beethovens Tod. 

Als Gottes Vitamin, Natur, Virß Leben 

besrfluf, gut turin zu susmlyan ihn zufulln..."

OH SHIT, this 19th century German handwriting is kind of hard to read. Let's try another one -- ooh, how about this one, a poem about the Beethoven Haus!

"Cauliflower Hals -- no no wait, Beethovens Haus.

Nioidie soyglizen vdoodlen zur Noidles

zweifzen parllößen und zwisgen Züllen

vwrowlrn mit blinden zolgwlnllien Grizwnealfw;jk

alwelfkjl; und ;wlaekf durch alle wpoeaiejfazdoj klmfa.edc."

RUH ROH

But on the bright side, I'm getting slightly better at it -- at this rate, I'll be able to read at least four poems by the time I leave Bonn. 

In conclusion: travelling alone for the first time -- as a researcher and proto-scholar, not only as a tourist -- is daunting. The process of preparing for my trip has been hectic, and I haven't felt this much anxiety since comps... but ultimately, it's an adventure. That's what this blog is all about: taking something that scares the wits out of me and transforming it into a positive experience, day by day, vegan cafe by vegan cafe, stammering German conversation by stammering German conversation, dirtied white cotton glove by dirtied white cotton glove, and cluttered sentence by cluttered sentence.

LET THE ARCHIVIZATION BEGIN!