Onkel Toms Hütte ... In Berlin....

5fish

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Our friend @rittmeister like our friend @O' Be Joyful kept secrets about Cincinnati, he keeping secrets about Berlin... The city of Berlin has a district called Uncle Toms Cabin... based on Stowe's works...


ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF BERLIN, near the end of a subway line, an oddly-named neighborhood pays homage to a famous and flawed American abolitionist novel from 1852. When Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a decade before the start of the Civil War, the novel sold as well as the Bible. It soon attracted a loyal following overseas, especially in England, where slavery had been abolished two decades earlier.

snip...

The book was also translated into German in 1852, and it apparently made an impression. According to a history of Berlin subway stations, a local resident named Thomas opened a biergarten in the 1880s, on the edge of Grünewald forest. To help visitors stay dry, he built several huts that were apparently nicknamed “Tom’s cabins,” and they are said to have reminded visitors of the novel. The name spread to a nearby street, still called Onkel-Tom-Straße, and a local cinema, Onkel Tom Kino, that no longer exists.


snip...

The complex legacy of the novel makes it strange to find its name in Berlin. Near the Onkel Toms Hütte subway station, which was built in 1929 by the Swedish architect Alfred Grenander, a travel agency and choir are both named Onkel Toms Hütte. The local flower shop is called Onkel Toms Blumenhütte, or Uncle Tom’s Flower Cabin, and a neighboring burger joint is called Onkel Toms Burger. (A restaurant employee, when asked about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, said he had never heard of the book.)

snip... Note to All... Germans can only live in houses with pointed roofs... world take note...

During the Weimar period, the neighborhood was involved in an unrelated controversy. In the 1920s, a leftist housing cooperative built a cluster of modernist houses with flat roofs, and it too was called Onkel Toms Hütte. Traditionalists despised the new style, making the nationalist argument that true Germans should live in houses with pointed roofs. Houses from that period, some with flat roofs and some with points, are still visible today. The dispute is sometimes called the Dächerkrieg, or “the roof war.
 

O' Be Joyful

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Our friend @rittmeister like our friend @O' Be Joyful kept secrets about Cincinnati, he keeping secrets about Berlin... The city of Berlin has a district called Uncle Toms Cabin... based on Stowe's works...


ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF BERLIN, near the end of a subway line, an oddly-named neighborhood pays homage to a famous and flawed American abolitionist novel from 1852. When Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a decade before the start of the Civil War, the novel sold as well as the Bible. It soon attracted a loyal following overseas, especially in England, where slavery had been abolished two decades earlier.

snip...

The book was also translated into German in 1852, and it apparently made an impression. According to a history of Berlin subway stations, a local resident named Thomas opened a biergarten in the 1880s, on the edge of Grünewald forest. To help visitors stay dry, he built several huts that were apparently nicknamed “Tom’s cabins,” and they are said to have reminded visitors of the novel. The name spread to a nearby street, still called Onkel-Tom-Straße, and a local cinema, Onkel Tom Kino, that no longer exists.


snip...

The complex legacy of the novel makes it strange to find its name in Berlin. Near the Onkel Toms Hütte subway station, which was built in 1929 by the Swedish architect Alfred Grenander, a travel agency and choir are both named Onkel Toms Hütte. The local flower shop is called Onkel Toms Blumenhütte, or Uncle Tom’s Flower Cabin, and a neighboring burger joint is called Onkel Toms Burger. (A restaurant employee, when asked about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, said he had never heard of the book.)

snip... Note to All... Germans can only live in houses with pointed roofs... world take note...

During the Weimar period, the neighborhood was involved in an unrelated controversy. In the 1920s, a leftist housing cooperative built a cluster of modernist houses with flat roofs, and it too was called Onkel Toms Hütte. Traditionalists despised the new style, making the nationalist argument that true Germans should live in houses with pointed roofs. Houses from that period, some with flat roofs and some with points, are still visible today. The dispute is sometimes called the Dächerkrieg, or “the roof war.

I have never heard of it, till now. Zee @rittmeister may have more to say as he is zee expert upon "all" things. ;)
 

5fish

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Well there a dark side to the tale... The same story retold with a knew view... of Uncle Tom Cabin influence on Germany...



On the U3 Line of Berlin’s mass transit system, there’s a stop called Onkel Toms Hütte, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The stop bears the name of a neighborhood tavern and beer garden that stood for almost 100 years, from 1884 until 1978.
German restaurants, inns and beer gardens bore the title of the anti-slavery polemic, which became a shorthand for a type of Southern comfort – evidence of the novel’s complex, counterintuitive and, at times, disturbing reception.

When the novel was translated into German and published in 1852 – the same year as its American release – it was immensely popular. Though the melodrama about the cruelty of American slavery did much to stir German opinion against the practice, it also initiated a fascination with the seemingly simpler life of the slave depicted in Stowe’s domestic scenes.

A cottage industry sprouted up around it: plays, musical scores, even European-set reimaginings in which slavery became an increasingly elastic concept.

The Berlin tavern, built in 1884, adopted the name Onkel Toms Hütte because its proprietor liked the novel.
It was just one of many leisure establishments that drew on Stowe’s novel to promise a “good ol’ time.” Heike Paul, a professor of American studies at FAU Erlängern-Nuremberg, characterizes this attitude as a “romanticization of slavery and a nostalgic, even remorseful view of its ‘pastness.’”


snip... darkness comes...

This hazy romanticization was undergirded by racial prejudice, which found in Stowe’s depiction of Tom as a “happy slave” a justification for racial hierarchy. Though “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was originally cultivating sympathy for Black slaves, by the early 20th century it was invoked by both German progressives and conservatives as proof of Black inferiority and as a justification for colonization. An introduction to a 1911 German edition of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” describes how “the Negroes are undeniably an inferior race, and, now that they have been freed, are widely perceived to be a plague in the United States.

snip...
One of Hitler's favorite books....

Bettina Hofmann, a professor of American studies at Bergische Universität Wuppertal, argues that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” introduced racial terms to the German language that foreshadow the Nazi race categories. However, as she qualifies, “it would be an anachronism to accuse Stowe of having paved the way for Hitler’s thoughts on race.” Still, it remains a dim possibility that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had at least some influence. Stowe’s novel was, after all, one of Hitler’s self-proclaimed favorite books.
 

5fish

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'nuff said
As you enjoy your pre unification dwelling... Have you been to Onkel Toms Hütte section of town and enjoyed that travern before it was gone...
Is it an upscale area or modest area or rundown area...
 

rittmeister

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As you enjoy your pre unification dwelling... Have you been to Onkel Toms Hütte section of town and enjoyed that travern before it was gone...
Is it an upscale area or modest area or rundown area...
when it disappeared i was 15 and in bavaria
 

5fish

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when it disappeared i was 15 and in bavaria
Fine... what the area like... When I move to Berlin I may want to settle down there so I can feel closer to my Southern roots in another life... What do you think about the dark side( no cookies) of Stowe's book on German society... A college paper or does it have teeth...
 

5fish

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Mark Twain in Berlin... He seemed to like the city cute article...


snip...

The creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn lived the Berlin expat life for five months between October 1891 and March 1892. Despite his infamous distaste for the “ugly German language”, Twain was a big fan of the city, and the impressions he published in the Chicago tribune upon his return have an uncannily familiar ring to expat ears today!

snip... @rittmeister ever visit the Tiergarten district...

Twain’s first home in Berlin was at Körnerstraße 7, now in the district of Tiergarten. It was here that he translated the legendary German children’s book Struwwelpeter for his own children (it was eventually published as Slovenly Peter in 1935). Twain’s favourite character was Kaspar, the boy who hated soup – sharing the writer’s own dislike for the German winter staple

Here there a book about his time there...


snip...

In fall 1891, Mark Twain headed for Berlin, the “newest city I have ever seen,”

snip...

He suffered an “organized dog-choir club,” at his first address, which he deemed a “rag-picker's paradise,” picked a fight with the police, who made him look under his maids petticoats, was abused by a porter, got lost on streetcars, was nearly struck down by pneumonia, and witnessed a proletarian uprising in front of his hotel Unter den Linden.
 

5fish

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I found an article about Mark Twain in Heidelberg in 1878... @Daring Drea

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/travel/mark-twain-heidelberg-germany.html

snip...

And yet, despite his problems with German, Twain was smitten with the country. “Germany, in the summer, is the perfection of the beautiful,” he gushed. He was especially fond of Heidelberg, where he lived with his family in the summer of 1878. The city was “the last possibility of the beautiful,” he wrote, straining to surpass the superlative he had lavished on the country.

snip... writers block with Hackleberry Finn

n fact, the fictional river trip was already racing through his mind. Twain had started the novel before he went to Germany, but the draft was stalled shortly after Huck and Jim destroyed their raft in a collision with a steamship. No wonder, then, that Twain watched timber rafts rushing down the Neckar, “hoping to see one of them hit the bridge-pier and wreck itself.” He was in a creative crisis. This crucial chapter in Twain’s career is often overlooked. So I set out to understand it better by retracing his footsteps in the region

Here is a link to his Itinerary in 1878... He traveled... more than Heidelberg

 

5fish

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I found this on Berlin in the 1920's... I see backlash now... Why the far right


snip...

Not everything about the Weimar period was impoverishment and political turmoil. Germany experienced its own “Roaring Twenties” until they were cut short by the Great Depression. Cities burgeoned with new arrivals from the countryside in search of jobs, setting the stage for a vibrant urban life. Urban centers like Berlin became some of the most socially liberal places in Europe, much to the chagrin of conservative elites. Berlin had a thriving nightlife full of bars and cabarets. There were between 65 and 80 gay bars and 50 lesbian bars in the capital alone. Sexual liberation was a very real phenomenon, complete with a gay and lesbian rights movement led by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld who ran an Institute for Sexual Science.

snip...

Significant increases in women's rights were another achievement of the period. The Weimar Constitution extended the right to vote to all men and women over the age of 20 in 1919 (the United States did not adopt this standard until 1920, Britain in 1928). German Jews as well experienced a period of increased social and economic freedom.

snip...



Culturally, the period produced important and lasting results. As historian Peter Gay wrote, “the republic created little; it liberated what was already there.” Weimar witnessed some of the most important developments of early film such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Nosferatu (1922). It was home to famous authors such as Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and Graham Greene. In the art world, Weimar featured the Expressionist works of Otto Dix and George Grosz. The plays of Bertold Brecht appeared on German stages. The cutting edge Bauhaus movement changed the face of architecture.

Weimar also produced great thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. German scientists won at least one Nobel Prize a year from 1918 to 1933, including a physicist named Albert Einstein.
 

5fish

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So your fellow Germans named remote places after African places... like "Kamerun." There a WW2 village called "Afrika" ... @rittmeister . @Wehrkraftzersetzer


In German, it's spelt "Afrika" and that is also the name of a hamlet in the Uckermark district of the state of Brandenburg in eastern Germany.

"Kamerun" was a familiar name to people living in 19th century Germany. "Forsthaus Kamerun" owes its name to the Wagners, one of Germany's famous musical dynasties.
 

rittmeister

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So your fellow Germans named remote places after African places... like "Kamerun." There a WW2 village called "Afrika" ... @rittmeister . @Wehrkraftzersetzer


In German, it's spelt "Afrika" and that is also the name of a hamlet in the Uckermark district of the state of Brandenburg in eastern Germany.

"Kamerun" was a familiar name to people living in 19th century Germany. "Forsthaus Kamerun" owes its name to the Wagners, one of Germany's famous musical dynasties.
dude, kamerun (cameroon to you) was a german colony - many africans have an african and a european name (from the country that had a colony there) - the guys from kamerun i know have all but one a german european name (we lost the colony in 1918, btw)
 

5fish

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A place for @rittmeister to visit...


Teufelsberg (German: [ˈtɔʏfl̩sbɛʁk] (listen); German for Devil's Mountain) is a non-natural hill in Berlin, Germany, in the Grunewald locality of former West Berlin. It rises about 80 metres (260 ft) above the surrounding Teltow plateau and 120.1 metres (394 ft) above the sea level, in the north of Berlin's Grunewald Forest. It was named after the Teufelssee (Devil's Lake) in its southerly vicinity. The hill is made of debris and rubble, and covers an unfinished Nazi military-technical college (Wehrtechnische Fakultät)
 

rittmeister

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A place for @rittmeister to visit...


Teufelsberg (German: [ˈtɔʏfl̩sbɛʁk] (listen); German for Devil's Mountain) is a non-natural hill in Berlin, Germany, in the Grunewald locality of former West Berlin. It rises about 80 metres (260 ft) above the surrounding Teltow plateau and 120.1 metres (394 ft) above the sea level, in the north of Berlin's Grunewald Forest. It was named after the Teufelssee (Devil's Lake) in its southerly vicinity. The hill is made of debris and rubble, and covers an unfinished Nazi military-technical college (Wehrtechnische Fakultät)
yeah what counts as a hill in berlin


just for comparison
 
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