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.