ghosts & admissons

Don't let me live a life before my life flies by

In the year 799 AD Pope Leo the III fleeing his enemies in Rome took refuge with Charlemagne. Along the way his friend and trusted confidant St. Liborius was injured and died. The Pope laid him to rest at the site of a spring and eventually a cathedral was built and a town sprung up named Paderborn. Not far was a town named Lemgo which served as a trade stop for merchants of the Hanseatic League who were a medieval trading association of free cities in northern Europe.

Directly between these two locations was the site of a hard fought battle where in 9 AD the Cherusci war chief Arminius defeated the Roman legions and drove them from Germany and is ultimately credited as the beginning of the slow decline of Rome’s power in Northern Europe. Centuries later the event was used to stir up anti-Napoleonic sentiment and deep in the Teutoburg Forrest now stands a giant statue commemorating this decisive victory. In that blood soaked clearing among that dense forest the Hermannsdenkmal was erected by Bismark to rally a newly unified Germany around ancient triumph.

Down a small path just a few miles from the site is the Hochschule für Musik Detmold. And just out side that small town was Holtzhausen, a small barn with an apartment loft converted above a horse stable where the rent was just cheap enough for the a Hungarian bartender and his young wife who was studying opera to afford. It was there that I was born.

I googled it for the first time today.

posted by El Chupacabra @ 5:02 PM