Weimar Redux Seven

Speaking of which, Petra is a fortyish librarian at the Ana Amalia who has reminded me after a decade of no sex at all that I haven't forgotten how to ride a bicycle. She teaches me German when she isn't bringing me to climax.

Unfortunately, the vocabulary I'm learning isn't fit for public discourse. But the syntax is--make that sin tax. She is something of a German nationalist. Last weekend she sandwiched Tubingen (Holderlin) and Marbach (Schiller) over the meat of Stuttgart. German romanticism is not my cup of tea: she dragged me to the tower where the poor guy spent his last decades off his rocker.

The Krone hotel where we stayed,however, was an old fashioned break from Name Brand Sameness. And there was a delicious exhibition of the so-called Blaue Reiter school at the local Kunstgallerie. Marc and Kandinsky I know, but not so much August Macke. Back in Weimar I checked out several books on him--he was wiped out in WWI after a few months at the front, less than 30 years old. Ugh.

There were several Gabriele Munter's (You know my idee fixe that she is a much better painter than Kandinsky, who dumped her after sniveling around with her in Munich before he was divorced: I don't which bugs me more). And there were a few Marianne Werefkind's cheek by jowl with Jawlensky's, who dumped her after getting her fifteen year old charge pregnant!)

What a sleazy bunch of patriarchs those Murnau meanies were. I hope you get some brilliant young Stella Maris grad from the Richmond to write a Ph.D. thesis on the scandal of the wives and mistresses of "major" male painters not getting their fair share of fame and attention. She should start with Sonia Delaunay who was so much greater than her manic depressive Robert as to infuriate me every time I see a museum with a Robert but no Sonia!

Marbach was better. A cousin of Petra's is a Mss curator there, and after lunch at a local Greek restaurant, he showed us an original Kafka Ms. I know you get incensed at such relic worship, like cottoning up to splinters of the True Cross. But it was a kick nevertheless.