Tag: Annette Tuffs
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The journey into the blue
Annette TuffsHeidelberg, Germany “And when I came back – I did not return. You are never the same person you were, when you left.” Thus wrote Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) in 1946, in the newspaper Badische Zeitung in Freiburg,1 a few months after ending his forced absence of twelve years in France and California. The German…
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The morbid poet: Gottfried Benn, the morgue and the mysterious postcard
Annette TuffsHeidelberg, Germany “Worst of all: not to die in summer, when everything is bright and the earth is easy on the spade.” So wrote the German poet Gottfried Benn (1886–1956), three years before his death, in the poem “What’s Bad”.1 But if the wrong timing of one’s death is the very worst thing, what…
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The “Samariterhaus” Hospital and the “Institute for Experimental Cancer Research” in Heidelberg
Annette TuffsHeidelberg, Germany Dedicated to another great German Cancer Surgeon, J.R. Siewert, who has introduced me to the legacy of Vinzenz Czerny On the 25th of September 1906, a large crowd of Heidelberg citizens expectantly lined the town boulevard to the university’s Great Hall, waiting to cheer on the Grand Duke Friedrich of Baden and his wife…
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The Endell Street Military Hospital
Anne CooperStanmore, Australia In 1914, when Britain declared war on Germany, the women of Britain were still being denied the vote. The parliament, headed by liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, had been largely indifferent to the demands for women’s suffrage. Despite public support, precedents in the colonies,1 bombings, jail terms, hunger strikes, destruction of art,…