Experience the Majesty of Notre Dame by Getting a Free Download of the Video Game Assassin’s Creed Unity (Free for a Limited Time)

in Games, History | April 20th, 2019

FYI: In the wake of the great Notre Dame fire, the French video game com­pa­ny Ubisoft has decid­ed to make its pop­u­lar video game Assas­s­in’s Creed Uni­ty free through April 25th, allow­ing gamers to “expe­ri­ence the majesty and beau­ty of the cathe­dral.” The goth­ic cathe­dral fig­ures cen­tral­ly in the game. Start your down­load (avail­able only for PC users) here. Once you down­load the game, you’ll own it for­ev­er in your Uplay games library.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Laugh­ing Squid

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9 Science-Fiction Authors Predict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, William Gibson, Philip K. Dick & More Imagined the World Ahead

in History, Sci Fi | April 18th, 2019

Pressed to give a four-word def­i­n­i­tion of sci­ence fic­tion, one could do worse than “sto­ries about the future.” That stark sim­pli­fi­ca­tion does the com­plex and var­ied genre a dis­ser­vice, as the defend­ers of sci­ence fic­tion against its crit­ics won’t hes­i­tate to claim. And those crit­ics are many, includ­ing most recent­ly the writer Ian McE­wan, despite the fact that his new nov­el Machines Like Me is about the intro­duc­tion of intel­li­gent androids into human soci­ety. Sci-fi fans have tak­en him to task for dis­tanc­ing his lat­est book from a genre he sees as insuf­fi­cient­ly con­cerned with the “human dilem­mas” imag­ined tech­nolo­gies might cause, but he has a point: set in an alter­nate 1982, Machines Like Me isn’t about the future but the past.

Then again, per­haps McE­wan’s nov­el is about the future, and the androids sim­ply haven’t yet arrived on our own time­line — or per­haps, like most endur­ing works of sci­ence fic­tion, it’s ulti­mate­ly about the present moment. The writ­ers in the sci-fi pan­theon all com­bine a height­ened aware­ness of the con­cerns of their own eras with a cer­tain gen­uine pre­science about things to come.

Writ­ing in the ear­ly 1860s, Jules Verne imag­ined a sub­ur­ban­ized 20th cen­tu­ry with gas-pow­ered cars, elec­tron­ic sur­veil­lance, fax machines and a pop­u­la­tion at once both high­ly edu­cat­ed and crude­ly enter­tained. Verne also includ­ed a sim­ple com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tem that can’t help but remind us of the inter­net we use today — a sys­tem whose promise and per­il Neu­ro­mancer author William Gib­son described on tele­vi­sion more than 130 years lat­er.

In the list below we’ve round­ed up Verne and Gib­son’s pre­dic­tions about the future of tech­nol­o­gy and human­i­ty along with those of sev­en oth­er sci­ence-fic­tion lumi­nar­ies. Despite com­ing from dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tions and pos­sess­ing dif­fer­ent sen­si­bil­i­ties, these writ­ers share not just a con­cern with the future but the abil­i­ty to express that con­cern in a way that still inter­ests us, the denizens of that future. Or rather, some­thing like that future: when we hear Aldous Hux­ley pre­dict in 1950 that “dur­ing the next fifty years mankind will face three great prob­lems: the prob­lem of avoid­ing war; the prob­lem of feed­ing and cloth­ing a pop­u­la­tion of two and a quar­ter bil­lions which, by 2000 A.D., will have grown to upward of three bil­lions, and the prob­lem of sup­ply­ing these bil­lions with­out ruin­ing the planet’s irre­place­able resources,” we can agree with the gen­er­al pic­ture even if he low­balled glob­al pop­u­la­tion growth by half.

In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke pre­dict­ed not just the inter­net but 3D print­ers and trained mon­key ser­vants. In 1977, the more dystopi­an-mind­ed J.G. Bal­lard came up with some­thing that sounds an awful lot like mod­ern social media. Philip K. Dick­’s time­line of the years 1983 through 2012 includes Sovi­et satel­lite weapons, the dis­place­ment of oil as an ener­gy source by hydro­gen, and colonies both lunar and Mar­t­ian. Envi­sion­ing the world of 2063, Robert Hein­lein includ­ed inter­plan­e­tary trav­el, the com­plete cur­ing of can­cer, tooth decay, and the com­mon cold, and a per­ma­nent end to hous­ing short­ages. Even Mark Twain, despite not nor­mal­ly being regard­ed as a sci-fi writer, imag­ined a “ ‘lim­it­less-dis­tance’ tele­phone” sys­tem intro­duced and “the dai­ly doings of the globe made vis­i­ble to every­body, and audi­bly dis­cuss­able too, by wit­ness­es sep­a­rat­ed by any num­ber of leagues.”

As much as the hits impress, they tend to be out­num­bered in even sci­ence fic­tion’s great­est minds by the miss­es. But as you’ll find while read­ing through the pre­dic­tions of these nine writ­ers, what sep­a­rates sci­ence fic­tion’s great­est minds from the rest is the abil­i­ty to come up with not just inter­est­ing hits but inter­est­ing miss­es as well. Con­sid­er­ing why they got right what they got right and why they got wrong what they got wrong tells us some­thing about the work­ings of their imag­i­na­tions, but also about the eras they did their imag­in­ing in — and how their times led to our own, the future to which so many of them ded­i­cat­ed so much thought.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read Hun­dreds of Free Sci-Fi Sto­ries from Asi­mov, Love­craft, Brad­bury, Dick, Clarke & More

Free Sci­ence Fic­tion Clas­sics on the Web: Hux­ley, Orwell, Asi­mov, Gaiman & Beyond

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Isaac Asi­mov Recalls the Gold­en Age of Sci­ence Fic­tion (1937–1950)

The Art of Sci-Fi Book Cov­ers: From the Fan­tas­ti­cal 1920s to the Psy­che­del­ic 1960s & Beyond

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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A 16th Century “Database” of Every Book in the World Gets Unearthed: Discover the Libro de los Epítomes Assembled by Christopher Columbus’ Son

in Books, History | April 17th, 2019

The 16th cen­tu­ry was a thrilling time for books, at least for those who could afford them: build­ing a respectable per­son­al library (even if it did­n’t include nov­el­ties like the books that open six dif­fer­ent ways and the wheels that made it pos­si­ble to rotate through many open books at once) took seri­ous resources. Her­nan­do Colón, the ille­git­i­mate son of Christo­pher Colum­bus, seems to have com­mand­ed such resources: as The Guardian’s Ali­son Flood writes, he “made it his life’s work to cre­ate the biggest library the world had ever known in the ear­ly part of the 16th cen­tu­ry. Run­ning to around 15,000 vol­umes, the library was put togeth­er dur­ing Colón’s exten­sive trav­els” and ulti­mate­ly con­tained every­thing from the works of Pla­to to posters pulled from tav­ern walls.

Alas, this ambi­tious library, meant to encom­pass all lan­guages, cul­tures, and forms of writ­ing, is now most­ly lost. “After Colón’s death in 1539, his mas­sive col­lec­tion ulti­mate­ly end­ed up in the Seville Cathe­dral, where neglect, sticky-fin­gered bib­lio­philes, and the occa­sion­al flood reduced the library to just 4,000 vol­umes over the cen­turies,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Jason Daley. But we now know what it con­tained, thanks to the dis­cov­ery just this year of the Libro de los Epí­tomes, or “Book of Epit­o­mes,” the library’s foot-thick cat­a­log that not only lists the vol­umes it con­tained but describes them as well. “Colón employed a team of writ­ers to read every book in the library and dis­till each into a lit­tle sum­ma­ry in Libro de los Epí­tomes,” Flood writes, “rang­ing from a cou­ple of lines long for very short texts to about 30 pages for the com­plete works of Pla­to.”

The Libro de los Epí­tomes turned up ear­li­er this year in anoth­er col­lec­tion, that of an Ice­landic schol­ar by the name of Árni Mag­nús­son who left his books to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Copen­hagen when he died in 1730. Few­er than 30 of the 3,000 texts in Mag­nús­son’s most­ly Ice­landic and oth­er Scan­di­na­vian-lan­guage col­lec­tion (detailed images of which you can see at Type­r­oom) are writ­ten in Span­ish, which per­haps explains why the Libro de los Epí­tomes went over­looked for more than 350 years. Redis­cov­ered, it now offers a wealth of infor­ma­tion on thou­sands and thou­sands of books from five-cen­turies ago, many of which have long since passed out of exis­tence.

Colón’s unique­ly exhaus­tive library cat­a­log opens a win­dow onto not just what 16th-cen­tu­ry Euro­peans were read­ing, but how they were read­ing — and how the very nature of read­ing was evolv­ing. “This was some­one who was, in a way, chang­ing the mod­el of what knowl­edge is,” Daley quotes Colón’s biog­ra­ph­er Edward Wil­son-Lee as observ­ing. “Instead of say­ing ‘knowl­edge is august, author­i­ta­tive things by some ven­er­a­ble old Roman and Greek peo­ple,’ he’s doing it induc­tive­ly: tak­ing every­thing that every­one knows and dis­till­ing it upwards from there.” The com­par­isons to “big data and Wikipedia and crowd­sourced infor­ma­tion” almost make them­selves, as do the ref­er­ences to a cer­tain 20th-cen­tu­ry Span­ish-lan­guage writer with an inter­est in his­to­ry, lan­guage, and knowl­edge as rep­re­sent­ed in books extant and oth­er­wise. If the Libro de los Epí­tomes did­n’t exist, Jorge Luis Borges would have had to invent it.

via the Guardian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Rise and Fall of the Great Library of Alexan­dria: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

What Does Jorge Luis Borges’ “Library of Babel” Look Like? An Accu­rate Illus­tra­tion Cre­at­ed with 3D Mod­el­ing Soft­ware

Vis­it The Online Library of Babel: New Web Site Turns Borges’ “Library of Babel” Into a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

A Medieval Book That Opens Six Dif­fer­ent Ways, Reveal­ing Six Dif­fer­ent Books in One

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renais­sance Inven­tion Cre­at­ed to Make Books Portable & Help Schol­ars Study (1588)

Watch Umber­to Eco Walk Through His Immense Pri­vate Library: It Goes On, and On, and On!

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Animations Visualize the Evolution of London and New York: From Their Creation to the Present Day

in Data, History, Maps | April 17th, 2019

If you’ve ever lived in a metrop­o­lis like Lon­don or New York, you know the some­times-dis­ori­ent­ing feel­ing of expe­ri­enc­ing sev­er­al decades—or centuries—at once in the dizzy­ing accre­tions of archi­tec­ture, street, and park designs. Or, at least, if you’ve toured one of those cities with a long­time res­i­dent, you’ve heard them loud­ly com­plain about how every­thing has changed. Whether you study urban life as a his­to­ri­an or a city dweller, you know well that change is con­stant in the sto­ry of big cities.

The ani­ma­tions here illus­trate the point on a grand scale, with a satellite’s‑eye view of New York, above, from 1609 when the city was first built on Lenape land to its cur­rent con­fig­u­ra­tion of five bor­oughs, dense thick­ets of high-ris­es, a mas­sive, com­plex trans­porta­tion sys­tem, and 8,600,000 res­i­dents. It ends with a quote from E.B. White that sums up the geog­ra­phy and vibran­cy of Man­hat­tan: “The city is like poet­ry: it com­press­es all life, all races, and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accom­pa­ni­ment of inter­nal engines.”

The New York video “ani­mates the devel­op­ment of this city’s street grid and infra­struc­ture sys­tems,” writes its cre­ator Myles Zhang at Here Grows New York City, “using geo-ref­er­enced road net­work data, his­toric maps, and geo­log­i­cal sur­veys” to give us “car­to­graph­ic snap­shots” of every 20–30 years. Anoth­er project, the Lon­don Evo­lu­tion Ani­ma­tion, uses sim­i­lar tech­niques. But, of course, it reach­es much fur­ther back in time, to over 2000 years ago when the Romans built the first road sys­tem across Eng­land and the port of Lon­dini­um.

Cre­at­ed in 2014, the visu­al­iza­tion shows how the city evolved, “from its cre­ation as a Roman city in 43AD to the crowd­ed, chaot­ic megac­i­ty we see today.” As design­ers Flo­ra Roumpani and Pol­ly Hud­son describe at The Guardian, the project drew from sev­er­al sources, includ­ing the Muse­um of Lon­don Archae­ol­o­gy and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cambridge’s engi­neer­ing depart­ment. From these two insti­tu­tions came “datasets from the Roman and Medieval peri­ods as well as the 17th and ear­ly 18th cen­turies,” and “road net­work datasets from the late 18th cen­tu­ry to today.”

Oth­er archives offered infor­ma­tion on the city’s his­tor­i­cal build­ings and mon­u­ments. Cap­tions and a time­line pro­vide a handy guide through its long his­to­ry, as we watch more and more roads and build­ings appear (and dis­ap­pear after the Great Fire). These videos are use­ful ref­er­ences for stu­dents of urban­ism, and they might give some per­spec­tive to the New York­er or Lon­don­er in your life who can’t stop talk­ing about how much the city’s changed. Just imag­ine what these megac­i­ties could look like in anoth­er few hun­dred years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See New York City in the 1930s and Now: A Side-by-Side Com­par­i­son of the Same Streets & Land­marks

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

The Lon­don Time Machine: Inter­ac­tive Map Lets You Com­pare Mod­ern Lon­don, to the Lon­don Short­ly After the Great Fire of 1666

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How Leonardo da Vinci Drew an Accurate Satellite Map of an Italian City (1502)

in Art, History, Maps, Math | April 16th, 2019

When I look at maps from cen­turies ago, I won­der how they could have been of any use. Not only were they filled with mytho­log­i­cal mon­sters and mytho­log­i­cal places, but the per­spec­tives most­ly served an aes­thet­ic design rather than a prac­ti­cal one. Of course, accu­ra­cy was hard to come by with­out the many map­ping tools we take for granted—some of them just in their infan­cy dur­ing the Renais­sance, and many more that would have seemed like out­landish mag­ic to near­ly every­one in 15th cen­tu­ry Europe.

Every­one, it some­times seems, but Leonar­do da Vin­ci, who antic­i­pat­ed and some­times steered the direc­tion of futur­is­tic pub­lic works tech­nol­o­gy. None of his fly­ing machines worked, and he could hard­ly have seen images tak­en from out­er space. But he clear­ly saw the prob­lem with con­tem­po­rary maps. The neces­si­ty of fix­ing them led to a 1502 aer­i­al image of Imo­la, Italy, drawn almost as accu­rate­ly as if he had been peer­ing at the city through a Google satel­lite cam­era.

“Leonar­do,” says the nar­ra­tor of the Vox video above, “need­ed to show Imo­la as an ichno­graph­ic map,” a term coined by ancient Roman engi­neer Vit­ru­vius to describe ground plan-style car­tog­ra­phy. No streets or build­ings are obscured, as they are in the maps drawn from the oblique per­spec­tive of a hill­top or moun­tain. Leonar­do under­took the project while employed as Cesare Borgia’s mil­i­tary engi­neer. “He was charged with help­ing Bor­gia become more aware of the town’s lay­out.” For this visu­al aid turned car­to­graph­ic mar­vel, he drew from the same source that inspired the ele­gant Vit­ru­vian Man.

While the vision­ary Roman builder could imag­ine a god’s eye view, it took some­one with Leonardo’s extra­or­di­nary per­spi­cac­i­ty and skill to actu­al­ly draw one, in a star­tling­ly accu­rate way. Did he do it with grit and mox­ie? Did he astral project thou­sands of miles above the city? Was he in con­tact with ancient aliens? No, he used geom­e­try, and a com­pass, the same means and instru­ments that allowed ancient sci­en­tists like Eratos­thenes to cal­cu­late the cir­cum­fer­ence of the earth, to with­in 200 miles, over 2000 years ago.

Leonar­do prob­a­bly also used an instru­ment called a bus­so­la, a device that mea­sures degrees inside a circle—like the one that sur­rounds his city map. Painstak­ing­ly record­ing the angles of each turn and inter­sec­tion in the town and mea­sur­ing their dis­tance from each oth­er would have giv­en him the data he need­ed to recre­ate the city as seen from above, using the bus­so­la to main­tain prop­er scale. Oth­er meth­ods would have been involved, all of them com­mon­ly avail­able to sur­vey­ors, builders, city plan­ners, and car­tog­ra­phers at the time. Leonar­do trust­ed the math, even though he could nev­er ver­i­fy it, but like the best map­mak­ers, he also want­ed to make some­thing beau­ti­ful.

It may be dif­fi­cult for his­to­ri­ans to deter­mine which inac­cu­ra­cies are due to mis­cal­cu­la­tion and which to delib­er­ate dis­tor­tion for some artis­tic pur­pose. But license or mis­takes aside, Leonardo’s map remains an aston­ish­ing feat, mark­ing a seis­mic shift from the geog­ra­phy of “myth and per­cep­tion” to one of “infor­ma­tion, drawn plain­ly.” There’s no telling if the arche­typ­al Renais­sance man would have liked where this path led, but if he lived in the 21st cen­tu­ry, he’d already have his mind trained on ideas that antic­i­pate tech­nol­o­gy hun­dreds of years in our future.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Explains How the Ancient Greeks, Using Rea­son and Math, Fig­ured Out the Earth Isn’t Flat, Over 2,000 Years Ago

The Ele­gant Math­e­mat­ics of Vit­ru­vian Man, Leonar­do da Vinci’s Most Famous Draw­ing: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Saw the World Dif­fer­ent­ly… Thanks to an Eye Dis­or­der, Says a New Sci­en­tif­ic Study

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ear­li­est Note­books Now Dig­i­tized and Made Free Online: Explore His Inge­nious Draw­ings, Dia­grams, Mir­ror Writ­ing & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Notre Dame Captured in an Early Photograph, 1838

in Architecture, History | April 15th, 2019

Accord­ing to Le Monde, the fire that rav­aged Notre Dame is now mer­ci­ful­ly under con­trol. Two thirds of the roof–and that beau­ti­ful spire–have been bad­ly dam­aged. The same like­ly goes for some pre­cious stained glass. But the two tow­ers still stand tall. And the struc­ture of the cathe­dral has been “saved and pre­served over­all,” reports the com­man­der of Paris’ fire­fight­ing brigade.

The pho­to above, tak­en by Louis Daguerre in 1838, helps pay visu­al trib­ute to Emmanuel Macron’s words tonight, “This his­to­ry is ours… I say to you very solemn­ly, this cathe­dral, we will rebuild it.” God­speed.

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The Charlie Chaplin Archive Opens, Putting Online 30,000 Photos & Documents from the Life of the Iconic Film Star

in Film, History | April 15th, 2019

Char­lie Chap­lin knew his movies were pop­u­lar, but could he have imag­ined that we’d still be watch­ing them now, as the 130th anniver­sary of his birth approach­es? And even if he could, he sure­ly would­n’t have guessed that even the mate­ri­als of his long work­ing life would draw great fas­ci­na­tion in the 21st cen­tu­ry — much less that they would be made instan­ta­neous­ly avail­able to the entire world on a site like the Char­lie Chap­lin Archive. A project of the Fon­dazione Cinete­ca di Bologna, which has pre­vi­ous­ly worked to restore and pre­serve Chap­lin’s fil­mog­ra­phy itself, it con­sti­tutes the dig­i­ti­za­tion of Chap­lin’s “very own and painstak­ing­ly pre­served pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al archives, from his ear­ly career on the Eng­lish stage to his final days in Switzer­land.”

This online archive includes every­thing from “the first hand­writ­ten notes of a sto­ry line to the shoot­ing of the film itself, stage by stage doc­u­men­tary evi­dence of the devel­op­ment of a film, or a project that nev­er even became a film,” as well as mate­ri­als not direct­ly relat­ed to the movies: “poems, lyrics, draw­ings, pro­grammes, con­tracts, let­ters, mag­a­zines, trav­el sou­venirs, com­ic books, car­toon strips, praise and crit­i­cism.”

The vast major­i­ty of these items have nev­er before been made pub­licly avail­able, and all of them enrich our pic­ture of the mak­er of clas­sic come­dies like Mod­ern Times, City Lights, and The Great Dic­ta­tor as well as the high­ly event­ful peri­ods of his­to­ry through which he lived.‘

You can explore the Char­lie Chap­lin Archive by plung­ing straight into its col­lec­tion of more than 4,000 images and near­ly 25,000 doc­u­ments, or you can enter through its curat­ed top­ic sec­tions: one on Chap­lin’s ear­ly career offers a glimpse into the hum­ble launch of a cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non that would go on to tran­scend cul­tures and eras; anoth­er on music shows Chap­lin, who grew up in a musi­cal fam­i­ly with musi­cal ambi­tions of his own, con­duct­ing orches­tras; and a sec­tion on trav­el presents clip­pings and pho­tos relat­ed to his jour­neys to places like Bali and Japan, from which he returned on the same boat as Jean Cocteau. “Cocteau could not speak a word of Eng­lish,” Chap­lin wrote in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy of the voy­age home. “Nei­ther could I speak French, but his sec­re­tary spoke a lit­tle Eng­lish, though not too well, and he act­ed as inter­preter for us.”

“That night we sat up into the small hours, dis­cussing our the­o­ries of life and art,” Chap­lin con­tin­ues, quot­ing Cocteau’s sec­re­tary thus: “Mr Cocteau… he say… you are a poet… of zer sun­shine… and he is a poet of zer night.” These words, in turn, appear quot­ed (along­side the sketch of Chap­lin by Cocteau above) on the Char­lie Chap­lin Archive’s “Chap­lin and Jean Cocteau” page, one of its con­tin­u­ous­ly updat­ed sto­ries. Oth­ers col­lect mate­r­i­al relat­ed to Chap­lin’s lux­u­ry-item pur­chas­es, Chap­lin as direc­tor, and Chap­lin’s final speech deliv­ered as the title char­ac­ter of The Great Dic­ta­tor, which a recent announce­ment about the archive calls “one of the most licensed ele­ments of Chaplin’s work in the 21st cen­tu­ry” — a time whose sur­re­al­i­ty Cocteau might well rec­og­nize, and whose absur­di­ty Chap­lin cer­tain­ly would.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

65 Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online

Char­lie Chap­lin Gets Strapped into a Dystopi­an “Rube Gold­berg Machine,” a Fright­ful Com­men­tary on Mod­ern Cap­i­tal­ism

Char­lie Chap­lin Does Cocaine and Saves the Day in Mod­ern Times (1936)

Char­lie Chap­lin Films a Scene Inside a Lion’s Cage in 200 Takes

Watch Char­lie Chap­lin Demand 342 Takes of One Scene from City Lights

Cap­ti­vat­ing GIFs Reveal the Mag­i­cal Spe­cial Effects in Clas­sic Silent Films

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Thomas Mann Explains the Nazis’ Ulterior Motive for Spreading Anti-Semitism in Rare 1940 Audio

in History, Literature | April 12th, 2019

Here’s a rare record­ing of the Ger­man writer Thomas Mann, author of Bud­den­brooks and The Mag­ic Moun­tain, explain­ing what he sees as the real rea­son behind the sys­tem­at­ic spread­ing of anti-Semi­tism in Nazi Ger­many.

It’s from an NBC radio address Mann gave on March 9, 1940, while he was liv­ing in Cal­i­for­nia. Mann had gone into exile from Ger­many in 1933, short­ly after Adolf Hitler was elect­ed chan­cel­lor and began seiz­ing dic­ta­to­r­i­al pow­ers. The author had been an out­spo­ken crit­ic of the Nazi par­ty since its emer­gence in the ear­ly twen­ties.

In 1930, a year after he received the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture, Mann gave a high-pro­file “Address to the Ger­mans: An Appeal to Rea­son,” in which he denounced the Nazis as bar­bar­ians. A Chris­t­ian man mar­ried to a Jew­ish woman, Mann often spoke against the Naz­i’s anti-Semi­tism, which he saw as part of a larg­er assault on the Mediter­ranean under­pin­nings of West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion. In the radio address, Mann says:

The anti-semi­tism of today, the effi­cient though arti­fi­cial anti-Semi­tism of our tech­ni­cal age, is no object in itself. It is noth­ing but a wrench to unscrew, bit by bit, the whole machin­ery of our civ­i­liza­tion. Or, to use an up-to-date sim­i­le, Anti-Semi­tism is like a hand grenade tossed over the wall to work hav­oc and con­fu­sion in the camp of democ­ra­cy. That is its real and main pur­pose.

Lat­er in the speech, Mann argues that the Nazi attack on the Jews is “but a start­ing sig­nal for a gen­er­al dri­ve against the foun­da­tions of Chris­tian­i­ty, that human­i­tar­i­an creed for which we are for­ev­er indebt­ed to the peo­ple of the Holy Writ, orig­i­nat­ed in the old Mediter­ranean world. What we are wit­ness­ing today is noth­ing else than the ever recur­rent revolt of uncon­quered pagan instincts, protest­ing against the restric­tions imposed by the Ten Com­mand­ments.”

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Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared in our site in June 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

J.R.R. Tolkien Snubs a Ger­man Pub­lish­er Ask­ing for Proof of His “Aryan Descent” (1938)

Fritz Lang Tells the Riv­et­ing Sto­ry of the Day He Met Joseph Goebbels and Then High-Tailed It Out of Ger­many

Redis­cov­ered: The First Amer­i­can Anti-Nazi Film, Banned by U.S. Cen­sors and For­got­ten for 80 Years

The Enig­ma Machine: How Alan Tur­ing Helped Break the Unbreak­able Nazi Code

Lis­ten as Albert Ein­stein Reads ‘The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence’ (1941)

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