Sebastian Abbott

A trip to Bruchsal Castle

We decided to accompany my in-laws part way on their trip back home and to discover Bruchsal Castle (Barockschloss Bruchsal) as part of our outing. It turned out to be a real jewel in what I had always assumed to be an unassuming industrial town “en route” to elsewhere (sorry for these presumptions, which I really should try harder to resist!).

Bruchsal Castle from the rear, with a simple, strong fountain in the foreground

Indeed, the castle is initially a disappointment, looking a bit tatty and clearly restored with limited resources, paint replacing actual decoration for most of the building. It turns out that the castle was destroyed during WWII and painstakingly rebuilt in the 1970s, with whatever they had to hand. The jewels are the retained artefacts, which had been removed from the castle in around 1942, before the destruction in 1945. These artefacts include tapestries (Parisian and Belgian, in the main), and secretaries (in the sense of writing desks!) with fantastic inlays.

The building houses two further museums: a history of Bruchsal and the region on the top floor, in a setting that retains much of its 1970s “charm”; and a museum of musical automata, which fit very well the overarching theme that I picked out, of intricacy and patience.

Here’s a selection of photos from the house, which I would recommend as a place to visit - an not just en route… (An ornate engraving on a metal plate depicting a symmetrical architectural design with a central image of a bird in flight, intended for a musical machine from the 1800s, from the Musikautomaten museum, Bruchsal.

A grand, ornate chandelier with intricate crystal and gold details is positioned against a richly decorated ceiling mural, from the Schloss Bruchsal.

An opulent and intricate chandelier is reflected in a faintly corroded mirror, resulting in a ghostly image in Schloss Bruchsal

Detail from an ornate tapestry featuring a parrot motif in the centre. From Schloss Bruchsal

Ornate wooden doors from a secretary with intricate carvings and decorative metallic inlays, with cockerel motifs around the locks

Ornate inlay art from a secretary desk in Schloss Bruchsal with a scene depicting the town, and a checkered floor.

Cherubs armed with swords are an interesting motif from this secretary desk

The Pleasure of Concentration

I finally - probably not for the last time - started reading Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder. That may sound suspicious: admitting two authors is generally a bad sign for a book, but here it was a necessary conceit. Tony Judt was an eminent moral historian who was struck down with ALS (the illness made famous / trivialised by 2014’s ice bucket challenge fad): Snyder is an American historian of Eastern Europe who faded in and out of Judt’s comet trail over the years and who decided that Judt’s own history, views and development over the decades needed to be captured before the inevitable, swift, end.

So this is a “spoken book”, a conversation between two colleagues speaking and discussing at eye level, rather than an interview between a professional journalist and a professional of something else entirely. Judt and Snyder by necessity follow in the Eastern European tradition of such transcribed conversations. I’m looking forward to discovering the thoughts and philosophies that they discuss, and to daring to measure their theories and histories against my own reality and recollections: in short, I’m looking forward to the challenge of reading it.

As I say, I’ve only started. In fact, I have just finished the introduction - where a single sentence made me sit up straight and realise what I’ve been trying and dismally failing to achieve lately, especially at work. It is a single sentence that could become my standard for the next few years; a sentence that got me blogging again. It comes from Timothy Snyder as he describes how the conversations with Tony Judt came to be and how, in essence, they were. This is it:

...the conversation was also a great source of intellectual sustenance, bringing the pleasure of concentration, the harmony of communication and the gratification of good work achieved.

Those three points that combined give intellectual sustenance seem so obvious now that they have been written: perhaps they come more clearly from acknowledging something that went right - indeed, I couldn’t crystallise my dissatisfaction - at work, especially - into the negatives of those points. So let’s stick to the positives, and see if we can also achieve…

the pleasure of concentration
the harmony of communication
the gratification of good work achieved

…in all of our endeavours.