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My Pilgrimage to Stratford-upon-Avon

This is an edited version of a journal that I kept for my surprising trip to Stratford-upon-Avon this fall of 2026

Monday, 26 October 2026

Fifty years after spending four weeks in Stratford-upon-Avon with a group from Furman University where I did my undergraduate work, I have finally returned. I have been planning to do this for at least 10 years. I collected money for it at my 60th birthday party in May 2017. (I pushed it back to May because no one has time around Christmas.) Nonetheless, I had never gotten around to doing it. Some other plans or events came up that prevented it.

My finally getting here, however, went very fast. Thursday afternoon I got a phone call from a panicking Inga as I walked home after plugging our car into a charging station. Their daycare center in London had announced it was closing for three weeks until 9 November. By that evening she had booked a flight for me to Heathrow on Saturday, 17 October. Christine, recognizing her und Rubik’s desperate straits, just said, “Go! They need you.” I was very grateful for her generosity. Allowing me to disappear for three weeks is very generous.

Claudia had already planned to visit the first week in November, so that week was covered. There is only one guest bed since the apartment is small. Thus, I had to disappear for the week of Claudia’s visit. Even before I did, Christine had the idea to visit Stratford-upon-Avon in that week. Brilliant! So here I am!

After a wonderful rainy Saturday afternoon, mostly spent at the National Gallery, I left Inga, Rubik and Leo shortly after 10:00 on Sunday morning and made my way to the High Mass at All Saints, a very high, Anglo-Catholic, Anglican Church, that our English Church Music Director at St. Catherine’s had recommended to me a couple of years ago when I asked him where I could got go in London. The service was impressive, almost pre-Vatican II Catholic. Lots of incense and singing. Outside in the courtyard at coffee following the service, I felt like I was in a time machine when I saw the Anglican clergy in black cassocks and wearing a zucchetto (skullcap). I am not accustomed to a service like that one. The name High Mass gave me a hint of what to expect. As strange in a good way as it was, I really enjoyed it. The strangeness, the otherness of the liturgy and the language underlines that what we are doing at that moment is not something every day, but special. It focusses my attention and concentration on something different, an intense feeling of the presence of God and our focused attention on him.

In any event, I didn’t stay for coffee where I could have spoken with the priests and a few people because I didn’t want to end up rushing to the train. A funny thing happened at the very beginning, though. The friendly woman who gave me the worship sheet asked me if I would like to put my suitcase and backpack aside where she was watching the door and I gladly took her up on her offer. I then took a seat in the back where I could clearly see the altar and my luggage. At some point I heard a buzzing, but thought nothing of it. Then the woman came to me and said that the noise was coming from my luggage! Embarrassing! I dashed over to check. It was my beard trimmer!! When I put the backpack down, the load shifted and something in my toilet kit hit the button to start the trimmer. Fortunately, this was all before the service had begun.

My train trip to Stratford was uneventful, except for having to change trains twice. I had left enough cushion so that I did not have to run or rush. I got to Stratford on time. The trip led me through some breathtakingly lovely countryside once we had left London. Of course, there were unattractive areas we passed, but the landscape outside of the towns was beautiful. One could recognize, however, that it was very windy.

I easily found my B&B. However, finding somewhere to eat proved more challenging. The first three places I went to had all already closed their kitchens! So early! It was just after 7:00 PM that I started looking. At the fourth place I got lucky. I did not stay there very long, since I was so tired. I did not stay up late, but still needed a while to go to sleep.

This morning I just had to go downstairs to a classic cooked breakfast. After chatting with a family on the way to the Lake District and finishing breakfast, I headed out into the rain to explore Stratford. Having borrowed an umbrella from the landlady, I spontaneously turned toward Holy Trinity Church and Shakespeare’s grave. The church did not open for another hour and I could not find the grave in the rain. (I later discovered that it is inside the church.) I ended up taking a walk along the Avon and passed by The Other Place where I saw a young Ian McKellen in a brilliant production of “Macbeth” in the Fall of 1976. To this day, that is the most amazing production I have ever seen. I still remember it well – and get chill bumps when I think of it! I stopped to make a photo, but there is nothing on this week, very disappointing.

Despite the rain, I enjoyed the walk down the Avon which ended at the Royal Shakespeare Theater. I dipped in to dodge the rain and check out the shop. I also got my tickets for “As You Like It” this evening. After leaving the shop, I wandered through the city in the rain and finally found The Shakespeare Bookshop. I am proud of myself that I only bought one book at the shop and nothing at the RSC shop. However, I do have a few ideas for little presents. The biggest temptation was the recordings of assorted excellent productions of the Bard’s plays. So far, I have resisted.

I ended up at Box & Brownie, a café the sales clerk at The Shakespeare Bookshop recommended. Here I have sat for over two hours, sending a couple of messages and writing this. I also ended up having a nice conversation with an English couple from Hartford, north of London, who are spending a couple of days here.

After winding this up, I want to get out and move around a bit – and try to read a bit in my new book!

Tuesday, 27 October 2026

After leaving the coffee shop yesterday – it closed at 3:00 PM – I wandered around in the general direction of the theater and finally decided to park myself at The Dirty Duck, a minute down the road from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. I found a table in the Actors’ Bar, got half a pint and proceeded to read my new book, Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare, until it was time to order a bite to eat before I headed to the theatre. I just loved the time there. Everyone left me alone. They all just drank and talked and ate. After finishing my steak pie, I headed for the theater a bit early and parked myself outside to do my Italian lesson for the day, so I would not have to after the theatre.

It was a magical evening. You could feel everyone’s anticipation and excitement in the lobby and on their way to the seats. I could scarcely contain my excitement. After 50 long years, I was FINALLY back at the RSC to watch Shakespeare. It was like being in a dream. I felt like I was in a daze. I cannot begin to describe the production, except to say that it was great. The stage was simple, at the beginning just a white floor and a very high white wall at the back through which the actors entered and retired. When the scene shifted to the Forest of Arden, it turned into green grass and high plants on four levels. The production concentrated on the artists, not the stage. Shakespeare’s language and actors’ and actresses’ skill carried to play. It was very demanding – and it was brilliant. An interesting idea was to have a man play Rosalind, as would have been the case in Shakespeare’s time. It irritated me at first, but was very well, excellently played. The time flew by. In spite of sitting in the very last row, I could see and hear everything quite well. When Rosalind finished her epilogue, we all stood, clapping and cheering.

I more or less floated out of the theater after picking up my coat and backpack. It was all so marvelous. Since it was only about 10:30, I spontaneously went back to The Dirty Duck. It was the closest pub to the theater and on the way back to my B&B. The Actors’ Bar is small, so there was no table unoccupied. I joined a young man sitting along at a high table next to the bar, after asking him, of course. He turned out to be Taha, a young doctor from Chicago whose family immigrated to the US from Pakistan when he was a small child. He was on his last evening before heading to Edinburgh for a couple of days. We had a marvelous conversation in which we exchanged our stories of origin, assorted experiences and how we had landed at The Dirty Duck that evening. Unfortunately, we got thrown out – as did the other guests – when it closed at 11:15! We both sadly observed that the pubs and restaurants close early in Stratford. Nothing like Chicago, he said. Stratford is apparently still provincial!

I rode a wave of emotions back to my B&B such that I felt like I was gliding, not walking. It was windy, so I leaned into the wind, stretched out my arms as if trying to fly until the wind shifted as I turned the corner. On the way home I passed The Other Place and drifted back to memories of seeing “Macbeth” there fifty years ago. I also saw a young Ian McKellen in “Romeo and Juliet” that fall. After the play a couple of classmates and I landed at The Dirty Duck. Standing at the bar, waiting to order, I recognized a voice behind me. It was Ian McKellen! I turned around and said, “Hello!” He was talking with one of his colleagues I suppose. In any event, I interrupted long enough to introduce myself and to thank him for a wonderful performance. He smiled and thanked me – and then returned to his conversation. I am sure that he does not remember this. He gets accosted by so many people, before and after performances. However, I shall never forget this moment.

Although I was tired, I could scarcely fall asleep. Even as I write this, I am reveling in the emotions from last night. It was truly a magical evening.

This morning I had tickets to Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. After quickly finishing my massive English Breakfast, I left for the walk to the cottage. It was a nice walk of about 1.5 km – most of it was on narrow paths between houses or across fields – and I was the first visitor when the doors were unlocked. I am trying hard to take my time here and not rush. I have five days! Consequently, I first wandered through the apple orchard before turning back toward the garden in front of the cottage. I wanted to take in every little bit of sensation and emotion I could. It was a beautiful morning, sunny not cool, not hot. Since the week is a school holiday in England, I have seen school age children and their parents in Stratford-upon-Avon. Nonetheless, most of the visitors are older. At the cottage, I saw two families, but otherwise I had the feeling that I was one of the younger guests! The cottage was very interesting. Tudors had a life very different from ours! That is obvious, of course. However, you get a different feel for it when you see how a well-situated farmer lived. The same goes for Shakespeare’s Birthplace, which I visited later.

I took the longer, somewhat indirect way to his birth house because most of it was a bit away from the main streets, i.e. no cars, just mud, leaves, fences, houses and trees. Back in the center of town, I caught my breath on a bench in front of the Shakespeare Center, the entrance to the house.

The way to the house led through displays of articles from Shakespeare’s times and illuminated his father’s profession as a glover. It entered into a marvelous garden. The house itself is interesting, but I did not get as excited as a lot of the other guests. I am not a fan of personal cults, so seeing something that young William may have used or slept in or where he had stood did not make me ecstatic like some of the other visitors. Still, I am glad that I toured the house.

For me the highlight came afterwards when two professional actors in the gardens behind the house, played the scene in “Macbeth” after Duncan’s murder when Macbeth returns to Lady Macbeth with the bloody daggers after having murdered Duncan. It ended with Macbeth’s soliloquy from which Faulkner took the title of his novel, The Sound and the Fury:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
(Macbeth, Act V, Scene V, lines 24–28)

After “Macbeth” had stomped off, I hung around a moment, savoring the echo of his last words. I landed in my favorite coffee shop again. After the charming young owner threw me (and a couple of others) out again, I wandered down to the Avon, crossed over to the other side, parked myself opposite the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and read until the rain started again.

I walked to The Old Thatch Tavern for a pint and dinner. Breakfast is so massive that I skip lunch!

Tomorrow I have a tour of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre or Swan Theatre, depending upon what the RSC decides.

The adventure and the trip down memory lane continues!

Wednesday, 28 October 2026

When I walked into the theater to see “As You Like It” on Monday, the theater did not look as I remembered it. This morning at the Theatre Tour I learned why. It was not my poor memory. Rather The Royal Shakespeare Theater is a new theater built in 1986 and thoroughly renovated 2007-2011. The older theater in which I saw “Romeo and Juliet,” for example, was a proscenium arch theater like the Staatstheater in Stuttgart as was the new theater from 1986. Only after the transformation of the 2000’s was the new Royal Shakespeare Theater converted into a thrust theater in which the stage stretches into the audience and is surrounded by seats on three sides.

Shakespeare wrote his plays for a thrust theater like the Globe Theatre, whether the old one or the re-constructed Globe now in London. (According to our guide, there are still persons who show up at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon with tickets for the Globe in London!)

The tour began with a quick review of the history of performing Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon. Then the guide led us behind the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre to the area where costumes are prepared for the evening’s or afternoon’s production. They are cleaned, ironed and disinfected after every performance. On our way to the theatre itself, we passed some dressing rooms, but not all. They are on two levels, and the changing rooms used during the production are much closer to the stage than where we were. We sat in the Upper Circle just below where I sat Monday evening for “As You Like It.”

After she had finished her story, we got to ask questions. I was somewhat confused because she had told us that the theater opened 1879 had burned in 1926, but I knew I had attended plays here in the fall of 1976. It turns out that I had seen Shakespeare in the new building, the New Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, that was re-named Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1961 when the Royal Shakespeare Company was founded, but that was, as I said above, also a proscenium arch theater. The new thrust stage came later. Mystery resolved. The Other Place is still the same although the old tin hut has been bricked up by now. Nonetheless, it is the same building at the same place I saw “Macbeth” back in 1976.

When I asked the guide if The Other Place I have seen while here is the same building in which I saw “Macbeth,” I, inadvertently, cursed our group. An old superstition of the theater is never to mention the “M-word” in the theater itself. I had not known that! (I also learned that one traditionally does not wear green in the theater. It brings bad luck. Of course, you never wish an actor or actress “Good Luck!” You say, „Break a leg!” And that comes from the following: The heavy, high curtains in the back through which the performers enter are called “legs.” However, if you are unfortunate, the act before you in a variety theater where many theater groups also appeared, goes over his time and the owner says it is too late and you do not get to go out. If you don’t go out, you don’t get paid. To get paid you must “break the leg,” i.e. appear on stage. Thus the wish to a performer, “Break a leg!” It means you appeared on stage and will get paid!)

In any event, I apologized to the group. I hope nothing bad has happened to anyone! We were a small group, 11 people, including a young couple from London who stayed the night at my B&B. They are both teachers – and she teaches drama. As I learned when I bumped into them later this afternoon, he teaches physics. At the end of the tour the guide showed us wigs and explained how they are made (with human hair, the most expensive hair color is white!), stage blood and make up. Since it is almost Halloween, as the climax she showed us a very realistic decapitated head!

Following the tour, I spent a lot of time in the gift shop planning what to get for whom – and resisting buying more books. From there I went to the free exhibition The Play’s The Thing, with different costumes and information about the performances in which they were worn. The highlight was, however, the Holy Grail – an original First Folio! It is opened to “As You Like It” since that is on at the moment. I stood before it and stared at it for quite a while. It is not quite the same as the Gutenberg Bible, but for a Shakespeare fan it is truly something special.

I also went up the observation tower attached to the theater. I had a marvelous view of the countryside. Later the rain clouds came and dimmed the view. I had the good fortune to enjoy the view by sunshine. I checked out every nook and cranny of the theater that was open to the public, the bar, the reading room, the library, etc.

After finally leaving the theater, I sat outside on a bench and read for a little while until the drizzling started that turned into a light, but steady rain. I used the opportunity to buy a sandwich and some water before parking myself in the glassed-in bridge from the observation tower to the restaurant, buying an over-priced cappuccino to justify my presence. It also has a great view, is just not as high.

I have decided to honor The Windmill Inn with my presence this evening. I tried it my first evening here. Unfortunately, they had run out of food and shut down the kitchen about five minutes before I got there!

The rain clouds have gone away and the sun is shining again. I had forgotten how beautiful this area is. I was first reminded on my walk to Anne Hathaway’s Cottage on Tuesday. Significantly, Shakespeare lived in Stratford-upon-Avon. He owned a house here. His family, wife and children, were here. In London he lived in rented lodgings and returned home as often as he could. In a sense he remained a country boy, formed by and loving the area in which he grew. Unlike his Cambridge or Oxford trained rivals, he never settled in the city. In Soul of the Age Jonathan Bate points out how well-versed Shakespeare was in the plants and fauna of Warwickshire, in particular, and England, in general. He retained his connection with the land and area of his birth until his death.

In his plays the country is positively presented. He associates it with health, morals, good simple honest people and the like. The city or the court are a stark contrast: full of liars, thieves, amoral ambition, murder, death and illness, just to name a few negative things. Many of the plays oscillate between these two locations and their associated extremes.

I dare not compare myself with Shakespeare. Nonetheless, I understand. I have kidded about being a “country boy” and often said, “You can the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” Of course, there is a lot of teasing and role-playing in all of this, but truth as well, although I really did “leave North screaming” because I found the town and its people so limited and narrow-minded.

Nonetheless, I lived in North until I was almost 18 and it has formed me more than I long wanted to admit. I am not particularly sure how it formed me. Unlike Will, I did not learn much about flowers and plants: I successfully resisted my mother’s attempts to teach me! But the life at church, the everydayness of faith, its just being there, being part of everyday life has strongly influenced me. Surrounded by evangelicals and fundamentalists, not so many in North UMC when I was growing up, I never became one. Of course, North – the town, the churches, the people – was conservative, but it was also full of persons who were generous and would help you with no questions asked, give you the shirt off their backs although they did not have much themselves.

I also knew intelligent, well-read and educated persons, most of them women friends of my mother, who were conservative, but not dogmatic. One of them was our pastor when I was a teenager, a short, intellectual theologian, not a good preacher. No one could really understand him, but he was a good pastor who was there when he was needed. Ultimately, he was a bit of a misfit for North UMC. However, he recognized my gifts and encouraged me to think and ask questions. He personified for me the conviction that faith and intellectual rigor are not opposites, rather complement one another. (Lent one year he got up early every day to translate parts of the Septuaginta into English as a Lenten discipline before he started his day!)

To phrase it in another way, I grew up in a permission structure that allowed me to ask all sorts of questions and arrive at answers with which those around me disagreed. My poor mother and my poor father certainly groaned and were often disturbed by some of my answers. We heatedly debated them at the dinner table or in the “sun parlor.” (“Sun parlor” is what Mom called the den with the TV and where we all sat after and before meals when we were home – unless the boys retired to their rooms. I only did that to read or do homework. The only TV was in the “sun parlor.”). However, they never tried to force me to stop questioning and thinking, searching for my own answers.

To go Shakespeare, in their own way they never denied me permission to “feed myself with questioning,” echoing Hymen, the god of marriage in “As You Like It” (Act 5, Scene 4) as he advises the couples together at the end of the play: “Feed yourselves with questioning”, telling them to feed their minds with curiosity and inquiry so that reason can help them understand how they all met and how their story finishes.

I do not know how my story will finish. No one ever does. However, it has certainly developed in directions that neither my parents nor I have foreseen!

Thursday, 29 October 2026

A wonderful few days are coming to an end. This morning after breakfast I walked down to Holy Trinity Church, again. Unfortunately, it was still closed. It opened at 11:00, not 10:00 as I had thought. Since my tour of Shakespeare’s Schoolhouse started at 11:00, I walked behind the church and turned up the same path towards town that I had taken on Monday when I also arrived before opening time. I found a bench with a nice view of the Avon and read until it was time to leave for my last tour. I have spread my events over the four full days so I would not just drift through the day.

Once again, I arrived too early. Punctuality not being one of my virtues, I tend to arrive either late – or close to it – or early. In the last couple of years, arriving early has predominated, as is the case today. However, the others and I only had to wait a couple of minutes. The exciting part came when I had to find the email with my ticket. My screenshot was insufficient. After having found it, I joined the tour in progress and only missed about a minute. We got a general introduction to the building and its history before we went upstairs into the room where little Will actually had instruction. An actor playing the role of an Elizabethan school master gave us a feel for what it was like. School began at 6:00, 7:00 in the winter and went until 5:00 in the afternoon, only for the boys, of course. School was six days a week although Thursday and Saturday were half days. No vacations except religious holidays and a week in August (?) to help with the harvest. The schoolhouse itself is the original; built in the 1400’s, it is still standing and in use!

Instruction was learning by rote, assisted by the boy who sat across from you. If you survived – a third of the boys who started would die before their schooling had ended – you had a solid grounding in English and especially Latin and the corresponding literature. At the end, you would practice writing prose and poetry in Latin. A boy who passed the final year of grammar school had, according to Bate in Soul of the Age, a more solid command of Latin than contemporary undergraduates with a classics major. I certainly do not envy Will for the long school days and the rote memorization; nonetheless, I do wish I had such a command of Latin. In the last year the scholars got a smattering of Greek, but Greek was mostly learned at Oxford or Cambridge, not in grammar school. Of course, the noble boys all had private teachers.

In Elizabethan England the rigid class society was loosening up. Education provided a path upward, financially and socially, for smart, diligent sons of craftsmen like John Shakespeare. Unfortunately, John had financial problems, so Will did not attend the last year of school. And then he got an older woman pregnant, so he no longer could attend university. His father’s plan had been for Will to study law (as my father had hoped for me!). As we all know, Will had other plans. He had apparently been negatively influenced by the players from London on their tours through the country. These troupes often visited market towns like Stratford-upon-Avon.

At the end of the tour, I wandered back to Holy Trinity Church which was now open. I was surprised by its beauty. I had not expected that. I did not think it would be ugly, but the church is striking. I gladly paid the five pounds to go into the Chancel and see Shakespeare’s grave. He is buried between his wife and daughter in a row with his son-in-law. Hamnet, the other twin, is buried somewhere in the churchyard that surrounds the church. No one knows where. In the church yard to the left approaching the church, someone has recently planted a sapling with a small plaque in his memory, quoting his father: “He is dead and gone, lady. / He is dead and gone; / At his head a grass-green turf, / At his heels a stone.” (Hamlet, Act IV, Sc. 5) After leaving the church, I strolled back to the banks of the Avon and let the squirrels amuse me.

Seeing the playful grey squirrels threw me back to my childhood in North. Behind the house in which I lived until I was 14, squirrels, grey and red, ran through the high oak and pecan trees in the backyard. They chased one another through the limbs, down the trunk, across the yard, back up another tree and so on. I was forever fascinated that they never fell off a limb, even when they would leap from one limb to another. The Holy Trinity squirrels did not chase one another, perhaps too dignified; however, they diligently searched for acorns and nuts and did not let me disturb them. I have missed the squirrels in Germany. There are a few, but not many. Our yard was overrun with them – so overrun that my father often chased and cursed them because they stole the pecans he wanted to gather for us.

After we moved up the street to the larger house where my mom grew up, we also had pecan trees. Til the day he died, my father would meander through the backyard there, picking up pecans, stuffing them into his pants’ pockets – and cursing the squirrels. One of the highlights of visiting home from college or divinity school was getting the ziplock bags of shelled pecans that my father had saved for me. I love pecans – and cannot eat them without thinking of Pop. We were very different. I am sure he had hoped for another son, perhaps a lawyer! Nonetheless, after I had moved out and started my studies, paradoxically, we drew closer. I was finally able to see him with my own eyes and not through my mom’s. He did not talk a lot. He also did not get much opportunity! He showed his love; he did not talk about it.

One of those little gestures was to save some of the pecans for his son before his wife distributed them among her girlfriends, who did not all have so many pecan trees. Another one was the once-a-semester letter he wrote me. Suffering under the illusion I was spending all my time studying, once a semester he wrote me a one-page letter, only one sentence with lots of dashes, telling me what he had been doing (besides saving pecans from the pesky squirrels) and urging me to find a girl and go out and have some fun. To help me with that, he always enclosed a $20 bill. (Moreover, he had a marvelous handwriting! Unfortunately, I inherited my mom’s.) I looked forward to Pop’s letters! He was a quiet rock whom I long did not appreciate. Although he often did not understand me, he had my back – and I knew it. I was his child, and that was all that counted. I have tried to be the same kind of father for my children. In that, he is my role model, not my mom, who otherwise strongly influenced me with her love for books and reading, faith and intellectual curiosity.

In any event, I followed the Avon up to, behind and past the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. I sat on a bench a while watching the swans and other water fowl freak out as a boy fed them while I ate a bag of chips I had gotten with my meal deal the day before. I then read a while until it just got too cool. The weather is strange: not warm, but not cold. I can sit outside for a bit; however, slowly but surely, it gets too cool. (By the way, during my stay here I have discovered an almost surefire way to attract rain: sit on a bench and try to read. It is practically infallible – at least in Stratford-upon-Avon. The only day it did not work was today.)

I wandered off, trying to decide which pub I wanted to visit. I turned up Sheep Street, the main drag, so to speak, in the direction of The Old Thatched Tavern and then spontaneously ducked into The Fourteas Teahouse, a teahouse in the style of the 1940’s. (I didn’t get the pun in the name until I wrote this!) I got a bottomless pot of tea and chocolate fudge cake – and sat and wrote and read until well after 4:00 when they threw me out. Every time this has happened to me, the personnel has been so polite and apologetic, not at all like Stuttgart! As I packed my things, I had a nice conversation with a young man who works there on the side, having studied finance and now another real job. He will do a two-month long internship in Berlin next spring. We talked a bit about Berlin and his excitement until I paid my check and left.

Moseying through the town, I landed at a used bookstore – surprise! The biggest surprise is that I did not buy anything. I asked the elderly owner, i.e., older than I, whether he knew of an old B&B run by a Mrs. Bickerstaff. That is where I stayed 50 years ago. Unfortunately, he did not, so I said, “Thank you and Goodbye.” On my way to The Dirty Duck, I took a detour to the exhibition The Play’s The Thing to take a last look at the First Folio. Annoyingly, The Actors’ Bar is closed for a private event this evening, so I landed in the other, larger restaurant side.

My last evening in Stratford-upon-Avon is, of course, a bit melancholic, but not very. I am still reveling in my good fortune. Two weeks ago, I had no idea I would be here. Now, I can get around town without a map (or CityMapper). I truly feel at home here. Given the chance and the money, I would move here in an instant.

To be honest, I do not remember much about the town from my stay with Furman fifty years previous. I remember bits of theater, especially the production of “Macbeth” with Ian McKellen in The Other Place, and snippets from our classes as well as lunch in the pub across the street from the Shakespeare Institute, but that is all. It is much more the emotions that I feel, the associations with Shakespeare, his plays, his words.

I am also enjoying the pub culture. Everyone is friendly. No one is annoyed that I block a small table and sit, read and/or write. Nonetheless, it will be better for my health to return to Stuttgart where Christine will cook healthier meals than I have eaten here and ensure that I take better care of myself. I have slept well, but I have definitely not eaten healthily here!

It is has become even clearer to me here than it already was how strongly I am attached to the English language, my mother tongue. That explains, basically, my fascination with and, yes, love for Shakespeare – his incomparable mastery of the English language. Again and again, I find myself in his words and then lose myself in them again. This same applies to my love for William Faulkner’s works. His mastery of the English language, Southern American variant, is unmatched – and it resonates with what I heard as I was growing up. Mississippi is different from South Carolina. My old Mississippi friend from Vanderbilt, Richard, talks quite differently from me. And Shakespeare is even farther away, but his mastery and forming of the language I speak is unique. With Shakespeare and with Faulkner I ride on the wave of the language to wonderful, magical places. Hearing the words masterfully spoken and played in the theater in the case of Shakespeare intensifies that experience.

As my time in Stratford-upon-Avon winds down, I am extraordinarily grateful for the opportunity to return after 50 years. My only regret is that I was only able to see one performance of a play by Shakespeare. That is a reason to come again – but sooner than another 50 years!

Friday, 30 October 2026

I am in the train from Stratford-upon-Avon to Leamington Spa on my way to Canterbury with its magnificent cathedral, waiting for it to depart. I left my B&B shortly before 11:00. The chat with my landlady, who is apparently Russian, took a few minutes. Mostly we talked about cats. She has two Maine Coons who roam around the house and love to be spoiled by the guests. I decided to go straight to the train station and bypass the town. For one thing, I was afraid I may lose track of time and have to rush or, even worse, much worse, miss the train. For another, I did not want to cloud my pleasant memories of the past five days.

I spent my last evening at The Dirty Duck. Altogether I was there over five hours! I ordered my first pale ale shortly after 4:30. I had to wait about 10-15 minutes for a small table to clear, then spent the late afternoon and evening drinking, reflecting, writing, observing the guests, eating and drinking. I reviewed what I had written, especially the beginning, and polished the rest. I tried to read, but it was too dark – and the people were too entertaining. I believe that I outlasted two complete shifts of guests.

I believe you get a better idea of what England is or a feel for it outside of the cities. One point is that the cities, especially London, were severely damaged in the last war. The smaller towns like Stratford-upon-Avon were so unimportant that the Luftwaffe did not bother. I think this observation also applies to Germany – and South Carolina. Cities attract more people and that makes it more likely that “foreigners” land there than in rural areas or small towns. Consequently, you can get a better idea of what a country or area is like, originally like, when you seek out the rural areas and their small towns. This is a banal observation, nothing new to the sociologists. Nonetheless, it has first strongly impressed itself upon my mind during these days in Stratford.

The bad side this is the negative provincialism. There is nothing wrong in loving and valuing where you grew up, its customs, its morals, its landscape. It becomes problematic – and toxic – when you universalize them and are intolerant to anything, any person, any thought that does not correspond to local mores.

It does not follow that if one is born and grows up in the country or small towns one necessarily remains bound to this perspective. There are numerous examples of individuals who have grown beyond this. Shakespeare is one. I, on a very different, much lower level, am another.

I have often wondered why so many of my classmates remain bound to this narrow world-view. It is not that they do not or cannot see anything it. When I was growing up, TV was already everywhere. Practically every family had a TV. We had a window into other worlds. You did not have to read. You only had to watch. I am not talking about rejecting it all. I am talking about expanding it, learning, growing, incorporating different insights.

My guess is that it threatens them, probably in ways that they do not understand themselves. Otherness unsettles them, be it ideas other than theirs, experiences other than theirs, persons who look and talk other than they do. This is at a deep, visceral level that they do not realize. I think here about how the racist air in which I grew up has affected my spontaneous, unreflected, gut reactions in certain situations. I feel, I want spontaneously to react differently from what I want, what my values tell me is right.

Another factor for many is a very conservative, perhaps fundamentalist theology that rejects anything that cannot be found in the Bible. This book, which is also central to my Christian faith, is the source of all knowledge, all wisdom, so that anything, truly anything that does not correspond to what is found there is rejected. It is not merely wrong. This other idea or lifestyle or experience or whatever is diabolical, evil, literally from the Devil. You must reject it, not analyze it, think about it or consider and argue with it. You must reject it.

In this mode empathy also becomes dangerous. When you are empathetic, feel the hurt or even the sincerity of someone who is different from you, thinks or believes different from you, you put down the armor that protects you. It threatens to break through your isolation and make you uncomfortable. This powers so much of the frenzy and hate of MAGAworld.

This phenomenon explains how so many people I know from home who, although very conservative, for the most part, are decent, caring, often sincerely devout people could become committed Trump supporters.

And here I shall close, so I can enjoy the wonderful fall weather through the window of the train.

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What Is Going On and What We Must Do

Since I stumbled across On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century a couple of years ago, I have turned into a Timothy Snyder fan. (The book impressed me so much that gave all of my children a copy for Easter that year!) After the presidential election 2024, I posted all twenty of the lessons he has drawn from his studies on Facebook. I recently finished reading The Road to Unfreedom. I had bought it in Austin last autumn, but did not start reading it until I got back. It is enlightening, but more and more disturbing the deeper I got into it. Reading that book cost me a lot of sleep. For we see the utter disregard for factuality that Snyder describes playing out in the US – and thus far Trump has been very successful. The enemy is facticity.

He describes two extreme forms of politics that share disregard for factuality.

A politics of inevitability describes a world in which the future is just an extension of the present. The progress is automatic. There are no alternatives, so we don’t really need to do anything except keep on keeping on. Nature bred the market, which led to democracy, which brought happiness in the American capitalist version. The European version was a bit different but shared the belief in inevitability. Both of these stories resisted facts which spoke against this interpretation. Because Americans and Europeans told this story for over 25 years after the collapse of communism, they reared a generation without any sense of history.

Out of the ashes of a shattered politics of inevitability rise the politics of eternity as in Russia. Instead of promising a glorious future, extending out into time and thought for everyone, the politics of eternity circle back upon the history of one nation which it sees as a politics of victimhood. Time does not reach into the future; rather it circles back to the threats of the past. Because the government is fully occupied guarding against threats from outside, it cannot reform and develop society within. There is no progress, only the threat of doom. To distract from their failures, eternal politicians provoke outrage and elation, constantly swinging from one to the other. They drown the future in the outrage of the present. Denying truth, factuality, they reduce life to entertainment and emotion. Spectacle and emotion take the place of facts and reflection on them.

While politicians of inevitability use the facts to compose stories of well-being – better, faster, stronger, etc. – politicians of eternity smother facts, not only to deny the reality that citizens in other countries are freer and richer, but also to bury the idea that knowledge could lead to reforms, a better life in their country.

It is obvious that Trump’s politics, the worldview of MAGA, is that of the politics of eternity.

Between these two ideological extremes lies history, a diligent attempt to make sense of the facts. Snyder carefully distinguishes between “memory, the impressions we are given; and history, the connections that we work to make – if we wish.” (9) He reminds us “History as a discipline began as a confrontation with war propaganda” in Thucydides’s The Peloponnesian Wars.

Thus, the great enemy of the politics of eternity is facticity. Consequently, Putin developed a strategy Snyder calls implausible deniability. He denies what everyone knows, for example that Russians soldiers invaded the Ukraine in 2014, and his “political technologists” create fictions that unify the home front and confuse Western journalists.

This is a strategy that Putin and Trump have mastered. They both target what cyberwar professionals call “susceptibilities”: what people seem likely to believe given their utterances and behavior. (213) Both Putin and Trump throw out a cascade of lies, of spurious explanations, contradictory, illogical, just to confuse the public and obscure the facts.

We have seen this again in the days following Charlie Kirk’s murder. Trump and his MAGA allies attack the left as those responsible for Kirk’s murder although the young man accused of the crime hated Kirk because he was not conservative enough. The facts are irrelevant. They are more than irrelevant. They are a problem, so Trump and Co. spew lies, make up “facts,” and create diversions to distract the masses from the inconvenient facts.

The right in the US, religious and secular, with its assault on education and strong support from FoxNews, Newsmax, etc. and the megaphones of rightwing influencers and radio and TV talk shows has created the ideal subject of totalitarian rule that Hannah Arendt describes at the conclusion of The Origins of Totalitarianism:

The preparation [for totalitarian rule] has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist (p. 691).

Our task, our only hope is to continue to fight our way through to the facts and expose the lies – loudly, persistently. And to hope that we can help the deluded and misguided to find their way back to the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false.

Snyder’s lessons #10 and #11 in On Tyranny speak to this problem and give us guidance.

# 10 Believe in truth.

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

# 11 Investigate.

Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns (some of which come from abroad). Take responsibility for what you communicate with others.

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The Widening of God’s Mercy

This spring I read a book that I couldn’t put down: The Widening of God’s Mercy by Christopher B. Hays and Richard B. Hays.

The Widening of God’s Mercy elicits wonder and joy. It is a beautiful book written for interested lay persons, not trained theologians.

Against the background of the old tedious debates about the Bible, the gospel and human sexuality, The Widening of God’s Mercy has reminded me of what the gospel is all about and re-awakened my sense of adventure in following Christ and letting the Spirit lead me. One never knows where one may land!

Unlike the dogmatists, who know where they will land before they even start their intellectual pilgrimage, Christopher B. Hays and Richard B. Hays let the Spirit lead them when they read the Bible anew, doing their very best to put aside their previous thoughts and letting the text speak to them. The result is brilliant exegesis that plumbs the depth of scripture and allows the text to challenge us, question us and lead us to insights that may contradict what we have previously thought and believed.

I was reading The Widening of God’s Mercy while I was also preparing a Lenten course on the Nicene Creed. In the winding discussions of thinkers of the early church that led to the formation of the Nicene Creed and the debates afterwards, concepts such as “immutable,” “unchanging,” etc. are ever present. I have trouble with these concepts of God when I consider how the Son of God suffered on the cross as do and did many others. Here Jürgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God has strongly influenced me, of course.

Nonetheless, I was electrified to learn from Christopher B. Hays and Richard B. Hays how God has repeatedly changed his mind, changed “his mind in ways that expand the sphere of his love, preserve his relation with humankind and protect and show mercy toward them.” (4) One of their biblical examples is Zelophehade’s daughters in Numbers (Hebrew Bible); another example is Peter in Acts (NT). If you want to learn more, you have to read the book yourself!

On the basis of their reading the Bible anew, the authors conclude that many religious conservatives are wrong about two things. One is an essential point of theology: the character of God. The other involves ethics, how we live as Christians: their understanding of God’s will for how we live out our sexuality.

What is so moving and convincing is the way they both – Christopher, the son, an Old Testament scholar, and Richard, the father, one of the most recognized New Testament scholars of his generation – reach these conclusions. They are biblical scholars, so their conclusions are the result of close, deep, empathetic reading of scripture, in which they join in the ongoing conversation within the Bible itself. Moreover, they take us on their adventure of faith. The book itself is an adventure, a tour de force, written with such insight, passion and acumen that I could scarcely put it down and was sad when I was done. My copy is full of underlinings, exclamation points and comments in the margins.

For me the most fascinating and stimulating part of their discussion was not the part about sexuality. It was their contribution to our understanding of the nature of God revealed in scripture and how God’s mercy is continually widening and drawing us forward.

At the closing of the book, both Christopher B. Hays and Richard B. Hays reflect on their own, different journeys.

However, the deepest reflection and the most moving part of the book is Richard B. Hays’s reflection. He does not explain away his mistakes; he writes words of repentance. He repents of his lack of understanding when he wrote The Moral Vision of the New Testament (published 1996), in which he argued living out one’s same-sex sexual orientation is incompatible with living as a Christian (the solution was celibacy), and for the hurt and suffering his work caused for so many faithful gay and lesbian Christians. Religious conservatives have used his book as a brickbat in their attacks on these Christians and their allies since publication – and still do.

After years of discomfort and dismay at the misuse of his book and his own gradual recognition that he had been wrong and since changed his mind, he wanted to set the record straight.

It is significant, I think, that he not only informed everyone that he had changed his mind, but that he also repented of his mistake and for the pain he had caused. It is seldom enough that a scholar openly retracts what he or she had previously written and says that he or she had been wrong. Explicitly expressing his repentance for his errors and its consequences is something that I do not recall encountering with such candor in such a context.

It is poignant that he wrote this only a few months before he died of cancer on January 3, 2025.

This is one of the best – and most readable – theology books I have read in quite a while. I recommend it highly.

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A Theological-social Reflection on the Elections 2024

After the shock of the election results, I have had to deal with the extreme disappointment and the concomitant fears I have. Listening to then President Obama’s eulogy for the nine persons massacred at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, June 17, 2015 by a white supremacist for my class at UT Austin reminded me painfully of how far we as a nation have fallen since 2015.

Besides listening to Bach, I have turned to Reinhold Niebuhr’s little book, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. It has helped me to sort out what has happened a little. Niebuhr wrote it 1944, but it is still worth re-reading. I find it helpful to step back from the heated and often contradictory attempts at explanation that commentators and analysts all over the political spectrum have been presenting and to try to reach a deeper level of understanding that goes beneath statistics and voting block analysis. This it what Niebuhr offers in this brief, but insightful work.

The children of darkness, he observes, are those “moral cynics, who know no law beyond their will and interest.” The children of light, on the other hand, are “those who believe that self-interest should be brought under the discipline of a higher law.…[,] of a more universal law and in harmony with a more universal good”.[1]

A disconcerting observation – which history and the results of this election bear out – is that the children of darkness are often wiser in their cynicism than the children of light. For the children of light often underestimate or deny the power of self-interest, the depth of human egoism which can erupt in a frenzy of hate. The “demonic fury” he sees in fascist politics shows itself in the MAGA movement as well. Just as “[t]he profounder significance of Nazism lies in the fact that it sought to re-establish a primitive unity in the community….”,[2] the deeper intent of the MAGA movement has been to deny the diversity of American society. It explicitly wants to roll things back to a supposedly better past in which unity prevailed under the domination of society by white men, be it in politics, business, the professions, the church and the academy or wherever. One does not have to be white or male to buy into this myth as the numbers of Hispanic and Black men and women who voted for Trump show.

What Niebuhr’s analysis shows goes far beyond the sharp-eyed analyses of academics and journalists to a deeper level. We are dealing here with the principalities and powers of which we read in Eph 12:6. These powers manifest themselves in the ideologies of resentment and hate, in the discrimination and backlash. This deeper level makes the social struggle so difficult for the children of light and it also makes it so difficult for those seduced by these powers to recognize their seduction.

To be very clear, I am not calling the followers of this reactionary movement evil or wicked. I think some are, but they tend to be at the top. I suspect that many, probably most, do not see themselves this way. I know some personally and they are not bad people. If you were in a jam, they would be there in no time to help as best they can.

Nonetheless, they are wrapped up in and seduced by the powers of darkness. They cannot see how their voting behavior damages themselves and those like themselves. In more extreme cases they see it and support such policies anyway because they have bought into this white-man-first ideology, consciously or unconsciously. They have bought into it so strongly that they prefer to suffer disadvantages, such as poor health care and dying younger than necessary, before they allow the Others – minorities, immigrants – benefits that could lead to more equality and thus threaten their ideological superiority. The superiority is only ideological because they are often just at poor as the African Americans, immigrants, Asian Americans, etc. they want to keep from rising and are equally affected by poor health care, poor schools, loose gun laws, etc.

The political struggle against the forces of reaction is important. It is crucial. My point, however, is that it is about more. The conflict goes much deeper than this or that election result. It is about the soul of the nation. It is about the kind of nation we want to be. It is a spiritual struggle. Do we want to follow the powers and principalities of light or those of darkness?

As for me – I and my house – have chosen the powers of light – and the struggle goes on.

[1] Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics, ed. Elisabeth Sifton (Library of America: New York, 2015), p. 361.

[2] Niebuhr, 422.

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A Very Unpleasant (Re)Discovery and a Disturbing Parallel

These meandering thoughts have arisen in the past couple of weeks (February-April 2024). They belong together because the second part developed organically out of the first. However, if you like, you can read just one part and forget the other. Each part makes sense by itself – more or less. I will be the first to admit that, although I am a trained theologian, I am neither a specialist in New Testament nor a specialist in Church History. I thus scratch only the surface of these topics. If what I write motivates you to think more deeply about these issues and dive into them, then I have accomplished one of my goals in composing these thoughts.

Exegetical-theological

Several weeks ago, for the second time in a couple of days I kept a book that I wanted to return to the library. Two very different books.

Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust is collection of essays by American scholars (with one exception) published 1999, edited by Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel. This is a subject that I thought I knew, although I am by no means a specialist. When I was studying theology in Tübingen and Heidelberg in the mid- and late 1980’s and the early 1990’s, the silence and acquiescence of the German churches as well as fervent support for the “movement of renewal” that many saw in the Nazi movement was a hot topic among theology students. We read a lot about it on the side and discussed it frequently. I was always reminded of the silence of the White churches in the South during Jim Crow and regarding lynchings.

Nonetheless, I had an epiphany reading the book in the tram on the way to the library. During my studies in Tübingen I made the horrendous discovery that brilliant NT scholars bought into the idea that Jesus was Aryan and not a Jew. This was when I read Ericksen’s, Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emmanuel Hirsch, published 1985, a marvelous, disturbing book still worth reading. Gerhard Kittel was professor in Tübingen 1926-1945 and the founding editor the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, a 10-volume work finally completed in 1979. (My brother gave me the English translation, which I still have, as a present when I finished my M.Div. at Vanderbilt Divinity School in 1983.) Kittel joined the NSDAP 1933 and in his research and writing supported the German Christian movement and gave a theological foundation to the Nazi policies against the Jews. This shock was bad enough. Having no answer to the question “Why?” compounded it. Antisemitism alone could not explain this.

In her essay in Betrayed, “When Jesus Was an Aryan: the Protestant Church and Antisemitic Propaganda,“ Susannah Heschel offers an explanation. She observed that since the 19th century NT scholars had examined the gospels and what Jesus said in them in the context of first-century Judaism. They discovered that Jesus’s teachings were not new; he repeated ideas that were common among rabbis of that time. This recognition led to a crisis: If Jesus was repeating common rabbinic ideas, what was new and original about Jesus and Christianity? For these theologians, the Nazi racial theory was a gift. It solved their dilemma. They could insist that, although his teachings may have been Jewish, he himself was racially an Aryan. His racial identity was the decisive factor, not the source of his teachings. From this arose a defamatory characterization of Judaism as degenerate. I finally had an answer to “Why?” that makes sense to me.

However, as I read further, I made an even more disturbing discovery. I learned that serious, brilliant biblical scholars, some of whom like Rudolf Bultmann and Ernst Käsemann were in the Confessing Church and opposed the Nazis, who have formed generations of biblical scholars, share this negative characterization of Judaism. It is a Who’s Who of NT scholars I studied and used in the US and in Germany. Kittel and his fellow German Christians, desperately and ingeniously striving to prove that Jesus of Nazareth was racially an Aryan, were only on steroids. The only difference was their radicality, their radical consistency, pursuing this basic perspective to its logical, bitter, absurd end.

This inaccurate characterization, turbocharged by Kittel and his cohorts, carried over into theological research after the war. It allowed a radical juxtaposition of Jesus to a degenerate legalistic, narrow-minded Judaism. This inaccurate, misleading way of thinking survives to this day in too many theological works, highly technical and popular ones, although, to be sure, there are many scholars, also older scholars such as George Foot Moore, who wrote a magisterial three-volume Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: the Age of the Tannaim in the 1920’s, who have not gone down this path. Unfortunately, the other perspective has long dominated. A long list of works in all languages contrasts Jesus’s teachings with the negative foil of a degenerate Judaism. No theological direction is free of this. Liberal, fundamentalist, evangelical, all schools of theological thought are guilty of this sin. Only in the past couple of decades have theological thinkers faced this failure and begun to re-think their theology from top to bottom.

I have not written much, but I have taught and preached a lot. Which caricatures of Judaism have I transported in my own teaching and thinking? Which anti-Jewish stereotypes are buried in my own theology? Betrayal shocked me out my lethargy. I have put aside the books I had planned to read and have turned to exegetical works and church history as a theological re-set, a personal ad fontes, so to speak, back to the roots to re-examine and re-think some of my fundamental theological principles. How do I read the Bible? How do I use Judaism when I try to understand and interpret the New Testament? Now I am starting to analyze my own thought, so I can purge it of these stereotypes.

Historical-theological

However, the scariest part of all of this is recognizing parallels between the German protestant churches in the Third Reich and the years leading up to it and so many of the conservative protestant churches in the US. The parallels between the German Christians and what goes in the US under the broad heading White Christian Nationalism are disconcerting, to put it mildly.

The National Socialist message landed on fertile soil for most protestant Christians in Germany, especially the theologians. They were predominantly very patriotic German nationalists who identified loyalty to the Kaiser and the state and their German identity with their Christian faith. You must remember that Germany did not become a nation until after the Franco-German War in 1871, which the Germans won. As a result, Bismark succeeded in getting the Prussian king accepted as the emperor (Kaiser) of a newly founded Germany. Bismark was protestant. The Kaiser was protestant. The ruling class was protestant. The protestant churches were state churches and had a lot of influence. About two-thirds of the German population was protestant in the 1930’s and these were predominantly Lutherans. Martin Luther and the Reformation were German. All in all, this means that is easy to understand that German protestants identified German culture and history (Deutschtum) with Christianity (Christentum). This left little room for Catholics and practically none for Jews.

After the trauma of losing World War I and the humiliating Treaty of Versailles, all of this was gone – except for the nationalist ideology that identified Deutschtum with Christentum. Not surprisingly, these Christians rejected the Weimar Republic. The Weimar Constitution separated church and state and established a parliamentary democracy. Democracy, being open for and tolerant of different ideas, religions and lifestyles, most of the things that one associates with democracy as a form of government and the open society that accompanies it, did not fit in the world view of these Christians. And, of course, they did not like the separation of church and state; it cost the churches power and influence. Moreover, they hated and were scared of the Social Democrats, who were the largest and strongest political party and officially atheist. It did not help that many Jews supported the Social Democrats and held important party and government positions in the coalition governments. The only group they hated more was the Communists.

Being a good Christian meant being a good German; being a good German meant being a good Christian. Obviously, these German nationalist Christians also defined what being a good Christian and what being a good German meant. There were, of course, others, politically liberal, even socialist Christians, but there were not very many. Interestingly, being liberal theologically made the theologians more susceptible to the Nazi ideology than those theologians with a more conservative theology. Lutherans were also more positively disposed to the Nazi ideology than Reformed Christians who came from Calvin and Zwingli. The stark juxtaposition of Law and Gospel in Lutheran theology and Luther’s theology of two realms, the realm of the church and the realm of the state which are clearly distinguished and should not be mixed, i.e. the state left the inner workings of the church alone and the church did not mess in politics, proved to be problematical in the context of the Third Reich. In identifying being a German with being a Christian, the German protestant church betrayed the Gospel.

The Catholic minority did not share the theological underpinning of the protestant Nazi supporters and sympathizers. However, most of them, the church leadership and the laity, did share the conservative worldview, the suspicion of the Weimar Republic as well as the antisemitic undercurrent in German society and a hysterical fear of the Bolshevists in Russia. In this practical sense, they were not better than their protestant brothers and sisters.

That is the background, crudely summarized. Now let’s look at the parallels. To be very clear, I am talking about parallels, things that remind me of others, things that are similar. I am not saying everything in the US in 2024 corresponds to everything in German in the 1930’s.

However, does not the formula “Being a good Christian meant being a good German; being a good German meant being a good Christian” sound familiar? In any event, that sounds a lot like the environment, the air, in which I grew up. A good (white) American is a good (white) Christian; a good (white) Christian is a good (white) American.

Many Protestants in the US, as individuals and in churches, are identifying being an American with being a Christian. There is, unfortunately, a long tradition of doing this. The current variation is, however, politically much stronger than previous versions, more explicit and extremer. The most recent perversion is the former president’s selling a “God Bless America Bible.” This identification is repeating the same heresy we saw in Germany during the runup to and during the Third Reich. White Christian Nationalism is just the American variation of the German Christian movement

The humiliation of losing World War I and having to sign the Treaty of Versailles fertilized the ground that was already well prepared for a movement like the German Christians.

We see a similar, parallel move in the US. Trump and the MAGA movement constantly maintain that the US is in awful shape despite tons of data that show the opposite. There are even conservative commentators that concede that. To quote Matt Lewis, a conservative commentator, “MAGA (Make America Great Again) isn’t just a message on a red hat, it’s a mantra. And to acknowledge the ways America is currently great (and improving!) is to admit that the country does not, in fact, need a fulminating strongman like Trump to save us from the ashes of our once proud homeland.”[1] The MAGA movement needs this counterfactual narrative to drive its campaign for a new political messiah. Only HE can “save” America from this humiliation. It is easy to see the parallel to Germany.

Another general feature which we can observe on both sides of the political divide is demonizing your opponents, but especially on the MAGA side. Political speech has always been fiery and exaggerated. However, in the last 30-40 years – a shoutout to Newt Gingrich – this has been turbocharged. You no longer have political opponents with whom you may strongly and passionately disagree and try to defeat at the polls. In this atmosphere, after the elections, the two sides licked their wounds, accepted, often begrudgingly, their losses and then tried their best to govern the country. This, of course, meant that the minority tried to stop the majority as best it could using all the parliamentary and political tricks at its disposal, but the two sides also worked out compromises for the good of the country or the state as a whole and sometimes even agreed on some things – and admitted it!

Now, you no longer have opponents; you have enemies who are evil – and you fight them tooth and nail and never compromise. How can you compromise with someone who is the embodiment of evil? Politics descends to a battle between two different ideologies, two diametrically opposed ways of seeing society. You do not argue or discuss with your enemies. You discredit them, insult them, lie about them. You change the rules to your advantage as the Republicans have done everywhere possible in the US with gerrymandering and other tricks. You do everything you can. Morality and legality, much less the truth, are secondary, if not irrelevant. For the MAGA movement as for the NSDAP this is standard operating procedure.

There is, fortunately, no guarantee that the US will go in the direction that Germany did in the 1930’s, but the developments are very disturbing and there to see for all who do not close their eyes and their minds. We have time to prevent this, and one of the best ways to prevent this is to prevent the election of Donald Trump.

[1] Matt Lewis: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-needs-his-maga-followers-to-believe-america-is-screwed? Accessed: 29 March 2024, 6:00 PM

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85 Years Reichspogromnacht – Never Again Is Now

A photo of the Brandenburg Gate on 9 November 2023

Thursday, 9 November 2023, was the 85th anniversary of the Reichspogromnacht, 9 October 1938. With many from the conference on racial justice I was attending in Freiburg, I joined a group of ca. 350 persons at the square where the old synagogue had stood before the Nazis burned it down. Groups of police were stationed around the square, but fortunately no one came to disturb the memorial service. The weather was appropriate for the occasion: cool and rainy. It drizzled and stopped, drizzled and stopped the whole time.

On this night, 85 years ago, more than 1300 Jews were murdered. On this night and in the days immediately following roughly 30,000 Jews were arrested or imprisoned in concentration camps for the crime of being Jews. 1,406 places of worship and assembly were destroyed as were several thousand businesses belonging to Jews.

After having previously introduced discriminatory laws and removed all Jews from government positions including the universities, the Reichspogromnacht tested whether the German people would tolerate explicit violence against Jews. They would. This cleared the way for the so-called “Final Solution” – the murder of more than six million Jews. Altogether considering all of the victims of persecution, the Nazis systematically murdered an estimated six million Jews and an additional 11 million other people (Russian POWs, Sinti and Roma, homosexual men, Communists, etc.) during World War II. (This number does not include deaths on the battle field.)

We remembered and mourned the six million Jews Nazis and their allies murdered in the Shoah and the roughly 1200 Israelis and foreigners the Hamas terrorists murdered on 7 October 2023. More Jews were killed on that day than on any day since the Shoah. Both dates were on everyone’s minds and mentioned in the short speeches. When the cantor from Frankfurt began to sing the Kaddisch, the rain really started to come down; that fit the mood. The memorial service ended as it had begun – with a beautiful, melancholic saxophone solo.

We left silently. I quickly went off by myself although I saw several people from the conference. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Walking away I passed by a wall covered with posters of all the hostages – and slowed down trying to look at every poster. The youngest hostage is four months old and the oldest that I can recall was 81.

Now there is war again in Israel and Palestine. I mourn all the dead. It is all so senseless. The Israelis and the Palestinians shall either live together or die together. There is no other option. A two-state solution, as first proposed by the UN in 1947, is the only solution, even if will take decades for reconciliation and the wounds to heal.

After the Shoah the call went out “Nie wieder!” – “Never Again!” One could hear this every year at the memorial services for the Reichspogromnacht – and when there was another anti-Semitic attack or case of vandalism. It is sad. It is tragic.

Never Again is now.

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Why I Love the Theater

Friday evening, October 13, 2023, reminded me why I love the theater.

Christine and I saw a magnificent production of Don Carlos by Friedrich Schiller in the Staatstheater Stuttgart. It had a very simple, bare stage, practically no props, no ornate palace rooms or background. Everything was reduced to the acting skills of the performers and Schiller’s magnificent, powerful language.

It was a gamble. Everything depended upon the actors and actresses. If they are not good, really good, or if they have a bad night, it will be a long evening. However, they were all magnificent. It was one of the best theater productions I have seen in quite a while.

Theater can never match the movies with its incredible effects. Movies live from their effects. A movie can survive bad acting and a weak script and still entertain. Theater cannot. A lot of contemporary plays, including ones I have seen in Stuttgart, try hard to adopt and to adapt video techniques such as split screen by having actors and actresses perform simultaneously on different parts of the stage, sometimes separated by complex staging, sometimes on different levels, often with videos running in the background. This occasionally works, such as in a production of Shakespeare’s Richard III that divided the stage into two levels, but most often I find it all distracting or irritating. Regardless of the effects and assorted gimmicks, theater lives and dies with the skills of the actors and actresses and the quality of the text.

I love Shakespeare – and have come to love Schiller – because of the power of his language. Others can match or even surpass Shakespeare’s convoluted plots – but not the raw power and grandeur of his language. The same applies to Schiller or Goethe’s Faust, Pinter, G. B. Shaw and others. In the theater I ride on the wave of language, am born away, lose my sense of time and place and find myself again in the world of the play. When I look down and glance at my watch, the play has lost me.

That is why, despite Christine’s complaints, I love sitting in the first row. I want to see the performers sweating, the spit flying from their mouths as they exert themselves to project their voices into the last row. I don’t mind the fake blood spraying onto my white shirt (it washed out) or having to catch a chair that rolled off the stage. Once I almost got hit by a fake eye that was ripped out of prisoner’s eyesocket in a Shakespeare piece and thrown down on the floor – and almost bounced into my lap!

No movie brings the immediacy and the intimacy that a good play in a good production can. I enjoy a good movie. I can even enjoy bad ones if they are funny enough or the effects are really good. However, going to the movies and going to the theater are radically different experiences. The aesthetics are different. During the lockdown, for example, I streamed – or recorded and watched later – excellent plays. As good as they were, as good as the acting and the scripts and the staging were, there was no comparison with live theater. I enjoyed them, but it was different. The immediacy and the intimacy were missing.

I can trace the origin of my perspective back to a specific experience. As a junior at Furman, I went on Foreign Study to England Fall Term 1976. After six weeks in London and two weeks off to travel, we dived into Shakespeare for four weeks in Stratford-upon-Avon. It seems as if we went to the theater almost every night. One evening we went to an experimental Royal Shakespeare Company production of Macbeth at The Other Place, which was just two years old at the time. A young Ian McKellen played Macbeth. It blew me away.

Macbeth was played in the round. The stage was painted black with a white circle. All of the action took place in the circle. The actors who were not on stage sat on crates set up around the circle. The main lighting was one lamp in what looked like a coffee tin hanging over the middle of the circle. At one point Macbeth took it and threw it through the air so that it pendeled back and forth before finally coming to rest. The actors all wore black and their hair was combed back so that one could see their faces clearly. Absolutely everything was focused on their acting and Shakespeare’s language. Their voices, their facial expressions, their gestures carried the play. There was nothing else – except our imagination. I get chills as I think about this evening even now. It was magnificent – and that is saying too little. That is where the theater bug bit me. It was a terminal infection. I have been infected ever since.

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Some Thoughts on Pictures in My Mind

Having grown up in the South in the 1960’s and 1970’s (I don’t really remember the 1950’s), I have pictures of Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in my mind, not just images, old black-and-white newspaper photos or stills from TV news, but also thoughts or views of them. Basically, they are pigeonholes – stereotypes or classifications that sum up who they are and what they stood for and substitute for thinking. I hear the name and – bing! – I know who that is and what he thought and stood for. It is another thing entirely, of course, whether my mental caricatures of these individuals have anything to do with who they really were and what they really said and thought. I have such mental caricatures of innumerable persons who were in the news when I was growing up, athletes, musicians, actors and actresses not just political figures.

I thought I knew a good bit about Dr. Martin Luther King. As a Christian and a theologian, I have read a lot of Dr. Martin Luther King’s works and heard speeches, and, of course, I have read and heard a lot about him. I have watched speeches on YouTube and taught about him in school, plaguing my German pupils with English language texts and old grainy TV clips. However, I have been developing and growing in understanding and learning in the last months and years – and have realized that we White folks have sanitized and romanticized Dr. Martin Luther King. He was the preacher of non-violence, of love, who spoke of Black and White people living in peace together as equals, the Nobel Peace winner – and died, tragically, as a victim of violence. We have suppressed his radical criticism of American society.

In the same manner, we have demonized Malcolm X. He was, in my caricature, one that I shared with almost all White people, the opposite of Dr. Martin Luther King – a preacher of violence and hate, who spoke of Black and White people, the devils, living in separate worlds – and died, not surprisingly, as a victim of violence.

My caricatures began to wobble when I, embarrassingly late – 2019 –, discovered James Baldwin through the documentary I Am Not Your Negro and started reading his essays and visited the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in January 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic began to find its way into the news in reports about a mysterious virus outbreak in China. I bought book on slave labor after the Civil War, Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon, which I immediately read when I got home. I had begun to read in American history intensely the past couple of years focusing on the Revolutionary War and the founding of the Republic. For one thing, I was trying to find a source of hope in the Trump years and for personal reasons I resuscitated my identity as an American from the South. Combined these experiences were an epiphany for me.

I suddenly realized that I actually knew very little about Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Basically, I only knew the That. My knowledge took a big leap from the Civil War to the New Deal, but even here I knew next to nothing about what Blacks experienced and thought in this period. Somehow, I learned about the Birmingham boycott and soon I was following the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s as I reached school age in 1963 and began watching the news on TV with my parents and reading the newspapers and news magazines to which my mother, the high school history and government teacher, subscribed. Everything became much more real when my class was desegregated for a few months when I was in the 4th grade, but this was paused until the two schools in North were combined by court order. The fourth-graders from Dover Elementary School were back in their old classes by Christmas. They returned with the rest of the Black pupils from Dover High School with the start of the 8th grade.

In Baldwin I discovered a guide to this side of American history. He led me to take another look at Malcolm X and to take a closer look at Dr. Martin Luther King. I stumbled across a documentary on Netflix, Who Killed Malcolm X. That was the first time that I saw old film clips of Malcolm X and heard him speak. I understood immediately why he scared White Americans to death, but I also understood his anger. After watching the documentary with Christine, I pulled my old copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which I had bought for a seminar on religious autobiographies, but never read, and read it. I was fascinated and positively surprised.

The man I encountered, especially in the Autobiography, had similarities with my caricature, but showed a man, a human being. I began to understand his anger and his ideas – and his movement away from the Nation of Islam, his turn to orthodox Sunni Islam and the development of his ideas fascinated me – and challenged me.

I am glad that I have begun to move beyond the old pictures in my mind.

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Why Is American Society so Polarized? A Few Thoughts.

Since I first started paying attention to the developments in American society, I have been concerned about the way American society has begun to break up. Reading about recent book-bannings and teachers getting fired for daring to read thought-provoking, challenging books has enraged me and provoked the following thoughts.

Contrary to the yowling on the right, it is not the fault of minorities of all kinds, ethnic, religious, social, sexual, etc., asserting their rights as citizens of a free country and then fighting for those rights when the majority refuses to recognized them. The supposed unity of the past for which reactionary movements yearn was a façade anyway. American society was always diverse. That is one of its strengths. Just in the past one group, the majority of White people, defined its way of thinking, its values, its structures, all of which, of course, favored this group as normal, the correct way. Its interpretation of American history and understanding of what is good and right was what everyone had to accept as good and right. As long as the assorted minorities did that – or at least did not protest –, all was fine. The problems only began – in the perspective of this group – when minorities, regardless of which minority it was, began to question these givens.

However, a massive contribution to the shattering of the shaky unity of American society, the conviction that we all belong to one United States of America, although we fought hard about exactly what that meant, is the deliberate destruction of the public school system. The splintering of the American public school system has accelerated and sustained the splintering of American society that has led to the polarization we are now experiencing.

When I was growing up in North, SC, for example, all of the White kids attended the same segregated school. Private schools were something exotic. We played against one catholic school in high school athletics, but otherwise we mostly knew about them from TV or movies. Then the schools were desegregated when I started the 8th grade. All of a sudden private schools starting popping up all over the place like weeds, segregation academies like Wade Hampton Academy, Willington Academy, Travis Academy, Calhoun Academy. Those were the ones near North, whose names I can remember. They almost always bore the names of Confederate heroes. Others were founded as Christian schools, but research shows that was only a “guise.”[1] It is definitely not an accident that the South Carolina Association of Christian Schools was founded in 1967[2], for example. Some later merged or closed. Wade Hampton Academy and Willington Academy in Orangeburg merged in 1986 and called themselves Orangeburg Preparatory School. All of these private schools are still disproportionately White.

Following this period of resistance to desegregation of the public schools, we have private schools that are overwhelmingly white although these schools now admit and have a few Black and other minority pupils. The same applies to the private Christian schools for the most part. However, the 73 member schools of the South Carolina Association of Christian Schools teach a fundamentalist theology as they confess in their Statement of Faith: “(1) We believe that the Bible alone, in its autographs, is the verbal, plenarily inspired, and only infallible, authoritative Word of God, and that it is the only fit, final rule in all matters of both faith and practice.” Moreover, they explicitly deny membership to “those associated with, members of, or in accordance with the World Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches, the Modern Charismatic Movement, or the Ecumenical Movement.”[3] These schools do not educate; they indoctrinate. All of their pupils miss the heated debates with my classmates about religious, theological topics that I had at North High School, even after desegregation.

These confessional schools initiate their pupils into an isolated ecosystem. Pupils from these fundamentalist schools go to fundamentalist colleges and then to fundamentalist graduate schools or seminaries. Where are they going to learn critical thinking that challenges what they have always been taught? Not at these schools, colleges or seminaries. All who teach must subscribe to certain beliefs about the bible, ethics, etc. or they do not get the jobs – and if they change their minds, think a bit farther they get fired.

Instead of public schools that all children in the school district attend in which they experience different perspectives, beliefs, tastes in music and art and literature, forms of behavior that do not correspond to that of the majority, we have little islands of people that encounter people who are different or think differently from themselves as little as possible. They live lives in which what they have always thought and believed is continually reinforced. They may reach a high level of knowledge, and some of them may also be quite intelligent. They may achieve a lot. However, they never truly learn to think for themselves.

Home schooling is the same develpment on steroids. Social media tends to reinforce this as well. You get new info or feeds that correspond to what you already think. If you want other perspectives, you have to look for them and most people do not.

It is thus no wonder that American society is so polarized and splintered. The educational system produces this. Assorted voucher systems or state support for such private schools – see Oklahoma and Arizona, for example – is strengthening this tendency. Worst of all, this is not an accident. It is planned. This splintering into enclaves is precisely what some reactionary or very conservative groups want. It is in their interest that we not learn together, that we not encounter different ways of thinking and believing. When we do that, we will learn to deal with our differences in a constructive manner – and we may learn to see their selfishness and narrowmindedness for what it really is and see through them. They do not want that.

The backbone of democracy is the public school system where all children from diverse financial, social and religious backgrounds can meet and learn together and thus learn to live together in their diversity. This insight is behind the drive for universal public education that arose in the US following independence. It had its ups and downs and blind spots, for example, no schools for free Blacks and enslaved persons, but the impulse was there from the beginning.

Public schools that all attend are schools for democracy in which children encounter children who think differently, belief differently and look different – and learn to deal with these children who are not like they are. Public schools train and teach tolerance and understanding for others.

If it were up to me, I would ban all private schools and home schooling. Religious indoctrination has no place in any school – not even school at home. That belongs in Sunday School, the synagogue or other religious schools – or at the dinner table or in the den. Learning about different religions and, just as important, the different schools of thought in the different religions, on the other hand, has a very important place in education and belongs in schools. This kind of education about religions belongs in every school.

[1] Dyer, Jennifer Eaton (April 12, 2007), The Core Beliefs of Southern Evangelicals: A Psycho-Social Investigation of the Evangelical Megachurch Phenomenon (https://ir.vanderbilt.edu/handle/1803/10763) etd.library.vanderbilt.edu (PhD), Vanderbilt University. p. 23. Retrieved August 10, 2023.

[2] https://christianeducation.org/history. Retrieved August 10, 2023.

[3] https://christianeducation.org/about/statement-of-faith. Retrieved August 10, 2023.

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The Effects of Casteism and Racism on Those at the Top of the Hierarchy

On vacation in the cool and rainy Pfalz, I have finally finished reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. It is a powerful book, surgically clinical in its analysis, but down to earth with innumerable examples and stories that illustrate and support her analysis – masterfully written. If you have not read it, read it! I am still trying to sort out my thoughts and emotions. In the book Wilkerson examines the well-known history of racism and discrimination in the US, the 13 year terror of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany and the age-old caste system in India. In my almost 40 years of living in Germany, I have learned and studied German history, especially recent German history, to try to understand how such a civilized and advanced culture could descend so low. That is a journey on which many of my generation here have also embarked. I just joined them.

As a White male Southerner who grew up and started school under Jim Crow (my school was not desegregated until I started the 8th grade), I soon saw parallels between life in Nazi Germany and life in the Jim Crow South. It is nonetheless chilling to read how Wilkerson develops and explains the parallels. The Nazis studied the American South, the Jim Crow legislation, for example, to help them figure out how to codify their discrimination against Jews, Sinti and Roma and others. In her analysis of casteism, Wilkerson shows convincingly how destructive such discriminatory conceptions also are for those at the top of the caste hierarchy.

Mulling over this book after having finished it much too late one night, I remembered W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin. For these two thinkers have also written on the effect of racism on the racists.

If you have heard of DuBois and can remember one thing he wrote, it is probably The Souls of Black Folk. At least, that is the first book by DuBois I remember hearing about. It is still on my list of books to read in this vacation, summer 2023. However, he also wrote an essay entitled “The Souls of White Folk,” which I have read. It is a playful, amusing, savage deconstruction of the absurdity and brutality of white supremacy. In the midst of his bitterness and anger DuBois lays out the corrosive effect this illusion has on white souls that believe it: “Am I, in my blackness, the sole sufferer? I suffer. And yet, somehow,… there surges in me a vast pity,– pity for a people imprisoned and enthralled, hampered and made miserable for such a cause, such a fantasy!… A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal imprisons and lowers.”[1]

James Baldwin puts it a bit differently. In all of his work, he combats the “lie of whiteness.” (See, for example his essay, “On Being White… And Other Lies,” Essence, April 1984). The thought that the racists harm themselves shows up repeatedly in his writings in different formulations. The perhaps clearest and directed statement is found in an essay, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in my Mind,” which first appeared in The New Yorker, November 17, 1962, under the title “Letter from a Region in my Mind”: “It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others debases himself. That is not a mystical statement but a most realistic one, which is proved by the eyes of any Alabama sheriff….” That was in 1962. We know the old black-and-white photos and news clips and can recognize the debasement there. Sadly, it is still around. If you look into the eyes of the White supremacists in Charlottesville or others you can easily find on cable or YouTube, you will see the same twisted, tortured, dehumanized souls as in one of those sheriffs.

In their analyses of racism and casteism Wilkerson, DuBois and Baldwin show how destructive such discriminatory conceptions are for those at the top of the racial or caste hierarchy. You can only maintain these ways of thinking by dehumanizing those below you. The cost of keeping your place at the top of the hierarchy is dehumanizing yourself. Wilkerson’s, DuBois’s and Baldwin’s words radiate a radical humanism. In the midst of their advocacy and struggle for the acceptance of discriminated groups as full members of the human race, they sincerely care for the misguided racists or upper caste discriminators. Reading these words and feeling their passionate, radical humanism humbles me.

These conclusions are not only the result of observation and analysis. Recent empirical confirmation of the negative effects of racism and casteism for those on top comes from Jonathan Metzl. In his book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland, published 2019, he shows that more and more White Americans are dying “because white America’s investment in maintaining an imagined place atop a racial hierarchy—that is, an investment in a sense of whiteness—ironically harms the aggregate well-being of U.S. whites as a demographic group, thereby making whiteness itself a negative health indicator.”[2]

However, we must go farther than only fighting “the lie of whiteness,” as Baldwin calls it. Martin Oliver points out that we on the top of the race or caste hierarchy must also confront another, much more seductive lie: “a lie of enlightenment, righteousness, virtue. It is the lie that explains away responsibility and culpability by referring to some proof or evidence of achieved moral high ground.”[3] We use this lie to excuse us, to keep us from having to look deep into our souls. I was at that demonstration. I signed this petition. I can recognize racism and caste discrimination and point it out. I have this degree. I have studied here and there. I attend that church or that synagogue. I pray at that mosque or that temple. It helps us to feel good – and comfortable – because we can point to the unenlightened, uneducated, deplorables down there – and avoid examining ourselves.

And, quite frankly, that is my fear: Do I succumb to this lie? Do I rest in a comfortable self-righteousness that insulates me from having to deal with the whiteness in my own soul? I hope not, but I cannot be sure alone. As Metzl observes, “the larger conversation about the effects of whiteness is the one we, white Americans, badly need to have.”[4]

These thoughts about Wilkerson, DuBois and Baldwin are the little contribution of an old White guy to that conversation.

[1] W.E.B DuBois, Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins, Library of America: New York, 1986, p. 926

[2] Jonathan M. Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland, New York: Basic Books, 2019, p. 9

[3] Michael Oliver, “James Baldwin and the “Lie of Whiteness”: Toward an Ethic of Culpability, Complicity, and Confession,” Religions (16 June 2021), published online https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/6/447/htm, accessed August 10, 2023.

[4] Metzl, p. 11.