We Shot a Five-Week Hole in the Seattle Summer . . .

. . . but no regrets. A month or so ago, I promised to “soon” post about our three-weeks in Germany. In the meantime, we spent two weeks in summer school at Cambridge University. We can't both have our travels and summer at home at the same time, obviously. While I regret missing the shank of a Seattle summer I wouldn’t change anything. (Nor do I have second thoughts about our upcoming week in Ketchum, Idaho, in the shank, to use that cliché again, of September. Clichés are useful, aren't they? They become a cliché because they are so. But I digress; this is not about style or clichés. My style is confounding enough to me, much less to others.)

The two trips, so different in purpose, are curiously entwined and resonate with one another. The German trip was one of Classical KING’s annual music tours, this time to Dresden, Leipzig, and Weimar. Eleven musical performances, some private just for the 17 of us, others public events such as Dresden’s Semper Oper doing Turandot and the Gewandhaus Orchester Leipzig presenting an evening of Bach, Honegger, and Brahms symphonies. Private events ranged from string quartets to 

Sebastian Freitag, the young domorganist of Dresden's 
Kathedral Sanctissimae Trinitatis

organ recitals to leider: eleven musical events in seven days(!) spread out over nine. If you are a classical music fan who supports KING you should take a look at these tours. Ann and I tacked on five days in Berlin. She and I had not been there in decades: I went through Checkpoint Charlie in ’82; she, in ’65!

Breakfast at Boutique Hotel mittendrin Berlin, 
a must-stay if you're in Berlin

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Our summer school at Cambridge was our second year of this tonic in the shank (OMG, again?) of an English summer. The two weeks of a class each morning and afternoon, punctuated by three daily plenary, campus-wide lectures by Oxbridge experts on every subject imaginable, and having breakfasts and dinners with some 400 students of all ages from 70 countries, is an intense and stimulating experience. My afternoon pint of Guinness helped calm me down. 

Lunch on the patio of Millworks, on its millpond
off the Cam

But the special joy of this was sharing the experience with Ann; of meeting for lunch somewhere lovely, reporting what we had learned that morning, sharing over evening cocktails the ideas to which we had been exposed. Our course choices were varied: she took International Development, The Origin of England and the English, i.e., Anglo-Saxon England from the 5^th to the 12thC., and The Rise of Civilisation (as they spell it; recall George Bernard Shaw’s description of us as two peoples separated by a common language) as seen through comparative archeological excavations in Mesopotamia and Mexico. I also took the latter, as well as Five Famous Trials, The Magna Carta, and Art Movements of the 20thC. We attended an outdoor performance of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, part of the Cambridge Summer Shakespeare Festival. So, much, much, much to talk about. And to savor Cambridge's summer.

Everyone gets out and about along the Cam

How intertwined? In Dresden, we saw the remarkable choices the community made, both before and after reunification, to rebuild, to restore rather than replace the palaces and churches and opera halls and museums that had made Dresden the cultural and artistic center of Germany from the 15^th to the 20thC. 

Dresden's Frauenkirche, 1946 . . .

. . . and today

In Weimar, we saw the destruction of a democratic republic and the rise of fascist autocracy. In Leipzig we learned of the Friedliche Revolution, the people’s Peaceful Revolution that toppled the GDR and its Stasi and brought about the fall of the wall and reunification. 

In Berlin, we traced the rise of National Socialism and its scapegoating of Jews which gave the world the Holocaust, and witnessed German determination that today's youngsters do not repeat our mistakes. 

Between 1933 and 1939, thousands 
of antisemitische Gesetzgebung were passed  

In Cambridge we learned how a people is formed and strengthened by the merging of different folks bringing different values and viewpoints. 

The heterogeneity of Cambridge

We learned how villages and towns and cities form, and how governments evolve in those city centers and attempt by different means – the Stasi, the Gestapo, mythology, divine right, rule of law -- to get large numbers of individuals to conform. We learned how the Great Charter of the English, the Magna Carta, established that no man should be above the law. The treason trial of Charles and the fall of the GDR showed us how autocracies must give way to the people. The Scopes Trial pitted the village values of tradition and shared creed against the city-based elites’ science and skepticism. The same conflict played out in the trial of Penguin Books for making D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover accessible to the mass public. And the history of failed international development efforts demonstrated the limits of top-down governance. Artists calling out such impositions are of crucial value. 

The trial of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw, called into question the whole idea of national identity and citizenship. And, of course, Dresden and the English Civil Wars showed the folly of reverting to war to resolve some of these fundamental questions of how societies and civilizations should work. And throughout the five weeks, and since, what we saw and learned and discussed echo every day as Ann and I read the papers and watch the news.

So, yes, shooting a five week hole in Seattle’s summer was no loss. We gained an enriched and broadened worldview together.