How Martin Luther reinvented the book

Martin Luther didn't just spark the Reformation, he invented the modern book and the publishing industry. That's the intriguing story told on this, the eve of the 500th anniversary of his 95 theses, in Andrew Pettegree's new book Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe, and Started the Protestant Reformation. 

I reviewed the book for tomorrow's Washington Post. Here's a taste:

When Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door in the Saxon backwater town of Wittenberg, moveable type was something like the computer in the 1960s, a useful and expensive tool used by academics and elite institutions....Luther realized the untapped potential of print as a mass medium and used it to broadcast his message to lay readers across the German states, bypassing the traditional gatekeepers via this new social media. 

My most recent review for the Post was of Tom Gjelten's Nation of Nations in October.

Remembering the Fall of the Wall, 25 Years Ago

I was living in Eastern Europe in 1989, and was in Berlin during the crazy week after the Berlin Wall came down, symbolically the Cold War.  Hard to believe it was 25 years ago.

Five years ago -- on the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet empire -- I wrote a series of posts here at World Wide Woodard on my experiences that breathtaking fall and early winter. Here, on the anniversary of the Wall's opening, is the piece I wrote about Berlin.

The full 1989-2009 series, for those interested, can be read here (start from the bottom and work your way to the top to read them in order.)

A quarter century later, it looks as if the Post-Cold War Era has ended, with an autocratic Russia again scratching menacingly at the eastern marches of Europe. Hopefully the world -- and the Russian people -- have the will and good sense to prevent a return to that bleak Cold War world.

Photos (c) Colin Woodard. All Rights Reserved.

My Life as a Pirate Guru (continued)

Ubisoft is less than a week away from releasing Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag, and the pirate-related media blitz is underway. I'm pleased The Republic of Pirates -- and the intriguing era it explains -- is getting so much reflected attention.

As I noted last week, I've been in demand as a pirate consultant of late, and this week has been no exception. Viz:

VICE Media has released the third and final installment of their pirate mini-documentary, Rum, Guns, and Gallows, this one focusing on Calico Jack Rackham. Yes, I return in my cameo roles as "pirate guru" to the project. (You can see parts I and II here.)

Earlier today, the German site GamesTrust.de released this video wherein I can be seen discussing early 18th century diving technology next to a tank of sharks in (dubbed) German. Can't miss television there. There's also this piece from Italy's EveryEye.It. [Update: 10/28/2013: And this from Stern, the German weekly magazine.]

This morning, I decreed that pirates are back in a big way in the Calgary Sun, Toronto Sun, and sister papers. (You read it there first.)

And, finally, there's this from Latin Times on how Republic of Pirates is boosting the economy of Puerto Rico (with a little assist from NBC's Crossbones.)

Pirates. They're everywhere. There's no escape.

[Update, 10/31/13: Some more of my interviews are out now:

* Here in the U.S., this enjoyable discussion with Kill Screen.

* From Finland, an extensive print-and-video interview with Dome.fi (in Finnish).

* From  France, my feature article on the early founding of the Nassau pirate republic in this special pirates issue of Historia, the monthly Paris-based history magazine. (There's a paywall for the article, alas.) ]

Europe:managing offshore wind conflicts with fisheries

The 2011 edition of Island Journal is out, including my feature on how various European countries have negotiated (or failed to negotiate) the inevitable conflicts between offshore wind farms and fishermen. It has particular valence for the Gulf of Maine region, where numerous offshore projects are in the works.

In short, the European experience points to the need to plan ahead and for potential developers to engage the fishing community early on, well before they start thinking about where they want to put their turbine arrays. Countries that haven't done this -- Germany among them -- have regretted it, while those that have (Denmark jumps to mind) have managed conflicts reasonably well.

The article isn't available online, but New Englanders can find Island Journal at better bookstores, or can order a copy from the Island Institute, which publishes it, as well as the monthly newspaper Working Waterfront, where my Parallel 44 column runs.

As an aside, I've covered wind energy for fifteen years now, filing stories from Denmark and Prince Edward Island along the way.

1989-2009: Berlin, when the wall came tumbling down

I was in what is now Slovenia the night the Berlin Wall was opened, but was able to get the visas and train tickets to travel from Budapest (where I was an exchange student) to East Berlin, arriving at Lichtenberg Station 20 years ago this morning. "In accordance with my ass-backward approach to Europe," I wrote in my journal, "I visit West Berlin for the first time via East Berlin."

Lichtenberg Station was swamped with thousands of East Germans pouring into the city from other parts of Brandenburg, Saxony, and Prussia, rushing to see the West for the first time. Crowds filled every platform and had overwhelmed the underpasses. People pushed one another, children screamed, and police shoved people around. I had to lift and carry a stranger's child to rescue it from being trampled. My two traveling companions and I were swept along with the crowd -- there wasn't any choice in the matter -- flowing under the station hall, out onto the street, back into another entrance, and down into the subway system.

Even in those days, you could travel by subway from East to West. The East and West Berlin U-bahn systems connected at Friedrichstrasse Station, which had customs stations where one would normally expect turnstiles. In the upper galleries of the transit hall, guards with automatic weapons paced back and forth, on the lookout for trouble. The crowds that day were enormous; I noted in my journal that the lines outside the women's bathroom were 80 to 90 persons long. We were on 24-hour East German transit visas, so needed to exit to West Berlin immediately, but under the circumstances, none of the guards seemed to know where to send us to get our exit stamps. (Most lines had been allocated for East German and Polish citizens only.) I remember a long Kafka-esque ordeal trying to fight through massive crowds in claustrophobic underground passages, going from bewildered guard to bewildered guard, trying to find a way out of the DDR.

Once on the West Berlin U-bahn, we passed through several dimly lit ghost stations that had been sealed off after the construction of the wall in 1961. I remember some of them looking like something out of Fallout 3, but the videos I see on YouTube from the period show them clean and vacant, as if they might open up again the next day.

The 16th was a Thursday that year, and the calm before the storm. We heard at our West Berlin hotel that the DDR had issued almost 8 million transit visas for the weekend, and that they city was about to be overwhelmed. That morning I walked along the graffiti-covered wall from Checkpoint Charlie to Potsdammer Platz where, every hundred yards or so, somebody was chipping away at the wall with a hammer and chisel, either to get a souvenir or to knock their own hole in the fortification that had hacked their city in half (photographed at top left). A man let me borrow his tools to chip out my own piece. (I still have it, sealed in a Ziploc bag because the wall was said to have incorporated asbestos.) At one point I was able to prop a discarded gate against the wall and climb to the top (photographed on right).

At Potsdammer Platz, the East Germans had removed an entire section of the wall, creating a new checkpoint for their citizens to cross No Man's Land by car or on foot. People crossed back and forth, although at that time, funny enough, there were more East Germans heading home (with car-fulls of goods) than heading into the West. West Berlin policemen and East German border guards were chatting and drinking coffee together, pausing to let passersby take pictures with them. The British Army had set up a field tent and dispensed free tea to one and all. (Later, we'd see East Germans lined up outside certain West Berlin banks to receive their "welcome gift" of DM 150.)

I've not been back to Berlin since, and its bewildering to look at photographs of Potsdammer Platz today. Back then there was nothing there: just a stretch of grass (and perhaps mines) between the inner and outer Berlin walls.

As the day proceeded, the crowds grew larger and larger, and by evening there was a huge crowd in front of the Brandenburg Gate, gathered in the hopes of seeing the East Germans knock the wall down underneath. (They did so six days later.) Hundreds of reporters had gathered from all over the world, and had set up dozens of satellite trucks and camera stand-up stations. Lights bathed the wall and the party continued into the frigid night.

The next day, my friends and I got day passes to cross back into East Berlin at Checkpoint Charlie, my sneaker filled with an enormous wad of Ostmarks changed (at the street rate) at a West Berlin bank. While the East Germans were buying televisions and Sony Walkmans in West Berlin, I filled my knapsack with DDR-made drafting instruments and blocks of Erich Honecker-adorned postage stamps. "We never traveled outside the central portion of East Berlin, but I was favorably surprised," I wrote that night. "As far as socialist countries go, East Berlin was pretty nice. The buildings and Jetsons-like architecture were tasteless and bland, but they weren't bleak (as in modern parts of Budapest or Warsaw) or falling apart (as in Romania)." So was the 20-year old's first impression.

We returned to West Berlin for a final trip to the Brandenburg Gate and to get our bags. Unable to get hotel reservations in the west, we had to return to Budapest that night. Getting back to Lichtenberg Station proved even harder then getting away from it. At the customs point at Friedrichstrasse, thousands of East Germans were massed to return home with their "welcome gift" goodies. Exiting the overcrowded S-bahn at Licthenberg, the crowd was so enormous, many were in danger of being pushed off the platform and into the tracks. This was made worse by the East Berlin police, who blocked the exits for a time to reduce crowding within the station itself, where the platforms were also overflowing. I watched hundreds shove their way onto an already completely packed train to Karl Marx Stadt, causing some on board to cry out in pain as they were pressed against the walls of the corridor; babies were handed aboard through the windows. The scene seemed so desperate, we actually wondered if the Soviets were invading. Eventually the police arrived to force the crowd away from the train so it could close its doors and leave the platform. The scene was repeated a few minutes later for a train bound for Dresden.

Thankfully, fewer people boarded our international train and we were able to "escape" to Czechoslovakia before our return transit visas expired. As our train made its tortuously slow journey across the CSSR, protesters were beginning to gather in Prague, where the Velvet Revolution was about to begin.

For more on the 1989-2009 series -- including the opening of the Iron Curtain and visits to Ceausescu's Romania and inflation-plagued Yugoslavia -- click here.

Photographs (c) 1989-2009 Colin Woodard.

Bad Hotel: the German spa that abused my childhood doctor

This week I read with dismay that my childhood doctor in Phillips, Maine -- Gretl Hoch -- spent her final years being neglected, abused, and robbed by the owners of a German spa where she became effectively imprisoned.

Dr. Hoch -- perhaps the only foreign-born person living in our western Maine hamlet in the early 1970s -- was an intimidating figure among the under-10 set, with her no-nonsense approach to administering shots and a strong German accent that was inevitably (and unfairly) linked to stock characters from Hogan's Heroes. She practiced medicine in Phillips for more than 40 years, and had willed her ample estate to the Shriners' Hospitals for Children, SOS Children's Villages, and the Franklin County Animal Shelter in nearby Farmington. In 2004 she decided to return to her native Germany, to be closer to where her parents were buried.

Unfortunately she chose to check into a very, very bad hotel while her home was being renovated. At the Naturhotel Hessische Schweiz in Meinhard, owners John and Gudrun Stifel took advantage of the octogenarian doctor, who was suffering from Alzheimer's' disease. The Stifels cut off her access to her friends, family, and legal representatives, kept her in conditions that at one point had her hospitalized with dehydration and bedsores so serious they required surgery, and secured power of attorney over her $7.5 million estate, court documents show. When a relative was able to gain access to Hoch, she reported living in fear of Mr. Stifel who she said hurt her.

Dr. Hoch, 84, died in June 2008 while law suits on her behalf were still pending in Maine courts.

Last week, a Maine judge awarded her estate with nearly $7 million in compensatory and punitive damages. The judge found the Stifels had "cloistered Dr. Hoch at the Naturhotel when she was in an extremely fragile and vulnerable state...prevented her from having contact with her closest friends and family..[and] bullied, manipulated, and intimidated her to gain control of her money." A third person, Mary Wagner-Burkhart of Alexandria, Kentucky, was also found to have tried to improperly gain access to Hoch's estate.

Hoch's estate will now be going to charity, as she wished. The Stifels appear to still be in business. Maybe someone should check up on their guests.

[Update: 3/2/2011: The Stifels appealed the decision, but refused to turn over key documents to the court and yesterday were found in contempt. Their attorney says they are facing litigation in Germany as well. They are, as of this writing, still in business.]