Something for the German speakers today - the GNM (Germanisches Nationalmuseum) in Nuremberg is offering a position as museum education specialist for two years, to re-design part of the permanent exhibition. If that's in any way interesting for you, check out their full description of the job here on the museum website.

 (And just in case you did not know, if you're looking for a job in Germany for historians or related subjects, H-Soz-Kult is a good place to check. The position listed above is also there - and lots more.)

It's finally Friday (though where did the week go so fast?) and it looks like there will be scones, and games, and some general relaxing... which sounds like just the thing.

So... with this random photo of madder roots, let me wish you a good weekend! 

It's still the time of the year for winter foods, and that means... cabbage (or at least includes it). I like cabbage in about all of its forms, including the much-disputed Brussel's Sprouts, and I have a few favourite and go-to preparation types for the different kinds of cabbage.

In case you're looking for medieval recipes for cabbage, Christopher Monk, who's doing research and recipe recreation of medieval recipes, has you covered. Check out his Cabbage Pottage blog post, with a number of recipes for more or less enriched cabbage dishes - spiced up and thickened with egg yolk if you're cooking for a lord, for instance.

I've finally finished my little presentation for the Knitting History Forum conference - of course it took longer than anticipated because there were more and more questions. Which, at one point, resulted in a very nice part of an evening spent looking at the twisting actions made by the needles when I am knitting... and figuring out what exactly is happening there. That was fun!

So I'm quite pleased with the outcome. Next challenge will be to explain it all within the time allotment that I have...

In case you're interested in the conference, you can still get tickets for it; it's online only and will take place on February 3.  

While we're at parallels... if you're asking me about my favourite book, I'd be hard pressed to give you an answer, there's quite a lot of them that I enjoy and like to re-read now and then. Even a favourite author would be a hard question to answer - there's a handful of them as well. (Jane Austen is among them, by the way, and C.J. Cherryh.)

But my favourite playwright? Easy question. It's Bertolt Brecht. He wrote quite a lot of plays, most of them looking at the not-so-nice and not-so-intelligent character traits and acts of human beings. He's the inventor, so to say, of the style of the Epic Theatre, intended to get people to think about what they see on stage, instead of just getting drawn in and getting pulled along.

My favourite piece is the Threepenny Opera, which is one (if not the) of his most upbeat pieces. (Also has great music.) But he also wrote something very relevant to today's developments: "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui", which is a parable to the rise of Hitler. In case you're interested, there's the full play online, in a version brought onto stage by the CSU Theatre Production:

I only looked at a few of the scenes, but it looks good to me. Brecht-good, which means scary, in this case... There's also music, and dancing, and good costumes, and a lot of very obvious parallels to what we'd prefer to never have again.

If you watch it, I hope you enjoy it - do let me know in the comments what you think about it!  

If you listen to what certain extreme right-wing parties have on their agenda, you could feel like we've all been transported back in time. To about, hm, a hundred years ago? Approximately?

Mind you, I'm an archaeologist and as such I do datings just roughly. I won't attempt to pick an exact year to set into a parallel with today, but it definitely feels like the NSDAP has been re-born, and there's unfortunately plenty of people who are on board, and think that going back a century would be the solution to all our modern problems.

I really can't understand how this is happening, and part of me just wants to "disbelieve this illusion". But unfortunately it is no illusion, there's actually politicians saying things about deportation and firing squads out loud, and they are still on their posts and still active. I freaking cannot believe that this is happening here IN GERMANY! Of all places in the world. Goodness, the last survivors of the Holocaust aren't even all dead yet. We still have contemporary witnesses alive. (Oh, by the way, what they are saying is "yes, that's how it started back then".)

So today's work day will be cut short because I'll spend some of it going demonstrating against this fascist right-wing shit. Thank you very much.

Oh, by the way, you can sign about a gazillion of petitions to stop the AfD, and of course if you're in Germany, you can add your warm body to the group on a demonstration near you. There will be quite a lot of them this weekend (Erlangen is a little early, but who cares), and you can find them on this handy map from zusammen-gegen-rechts.org

Please stand up and protest. Write to your Abgeordnete. Say something. Protect our democracy. Because if we're time travelling back to the Nazi Era... we'll all be fucked.

One of the things I've come across recently is the fact that most Germans have no real concept of proper wilderness. Wilderness as in "no, there's really nothing and nobody around to help you when you get in trouble, and there's also no shop that will sell you food and water". Because, well, there's no such thing in Germany. You are never far from the next village, or the next road, or the next house, or the next shop. (I was tempted to write "or the next telephone booth", but that, actually, is not the case anymore. There's still about 12.000 of them left, but they will be taken out of service this year, according to Telekom plans.)

Germany as a country is rather densely populated, and there's a huge amount of roads to get you about everywhere in your car, if you so choose. Which means that you won't be able to get further than about 13.48 km from any road - and that's only the case if you travel up to the small island called Greifswalder Oie, off the coast of Germany. On the mainland, you're usually less than a kilometre from the nearest road - if it's more than that, you're already sort of far out.

If that's made you curious, go and check out the fantastic map made by Hans Hack, where you can see the distances to roads throughout Germany. And the next time you wonder why Germans have no concept of being in the wild, or feel like they are on a different planet if there's lots and lots of land with no signs of civilisation... you know why!