The curse of being a bibliophile

I grew up surrounded by the books of my father’s library. It wasn’t as big as Umberto Eco’s library, but it was enough for me. I never managed to have a very large one myself. Not for lack of books or interest, mind you. I simply moved too much around the world and, regrettably, had to donate several of my books when I left. Others, even more regrettably, were lost when changing residence. So many books, all gone!

Sure, today I could fit all the books I want in my computer or my phone. But one of the reasons I don’t like ebooks very much is exactly that they won’t do for a real library. You know, one with physical shelves and all. Another reason is that reading in paper is just more comfortable and relaxing. We already spend too much time in front of screens as it is.

I also love bookstores, and in particular small bookstores. The big chain ones won’t do for me. There used to be quite a lot of dusty, smelly used book stores in my home town when I was growing up, but I heard most of them closed because of Amazon or big chain bookstores. Those that had barely survived for decades received the coup-de-grace with Covid.

In Leipzig, there is a small old-style bookshop called “Polylogue”, in the upcoming neighborhood of Lindenau. It sells books not just in German, but also in English, Spanish, Italian and French. The owner is a charming French lady who moved to Germany 14 years ago. While the bookshop has been there for seven years, she said that they are struggling now because of inflation. People just don’t have that extra money to buy books. Covid, she says, was not so bad in the end: people were locked inside and had nothing to do, so they still bought books. But the current economic problems in Germany, in particular the huge increase in the utility bills, worries her.

While I am worried about the economy too, I did buy some books on my last visit, including a used book called “Traditional Aspects of Hell (Ancient and Modern)”, by a certain James Mew. It is actually a facsimile edition of a work published originally in 1907, although this particular edition was from 1972. It includes illustrations from ancient sources, and it deals with a very interesting, if a bit macabre subject.

I liked in particular the description of the Buddhist Hell, which, you might be surprised to learn, has the most terrible torments, rivalling the worst of Dante’s Inferno. Will I ever read the whole book? Probably not, but some books are nice to have just for reference or to look at the illustrations.

Some people say we shouldn’t judge books by their covers, and that illustrations are unimportant. I am more in Alice’s camp: “And what is the use of a book… without pictures or conversations?” Once I bought an Italian version of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” simply because it was a very nice edition with wonderful illustrations by Gustave Doré.

When I was young, I wanted to be an editor or to have my own bookstore. I never did, in part because I was always very bad at business and marketing. But I actually do have a small publishing house, Contrarium, although perhaps calling it a “publishing house” is way more than it deserves. Still, I do publish a magazine of literature and art, Geist, now in its fifth number, and I also edit and publish small editions of new or public domain books. The last one is an annotated version of “Cautionary Tales for Children”, the humorous classic book of caustic poems for children by Hilaire Belloc. (I wonder what current “sensitivity readers” would think of that one).

Yes, “sensitivity readers”. Nowadays, almost all book publishing in the world is controlled by only 5 large international conglomerates, the so-called “Big Five”. Two are planning to merge, so perhaps soon they will be the “Big Four”. They have so much power that they can do whatever they want, and one of the things they have been doing lately is hiring “sensitivity readers”. These are people who are paid to review books in order to find instances or “racism”, “sexism”, “trans-phobia”, “fat-phobia” and other modern sins, and rewrite them to accommodate for the modern politically correct urges.

Recently there was some backlash when people discovered that the work of children’s author Roald Dahl — who is published by one of the “Big Five”, Penguin Random House, and whose copyright is now totally owned by Netflix — had been rewritten to remove language deemed offensive. Even complete lines of dialog were changed. Women were no longer called “fat”, and, in fact, in some cases they were not even called “women”, as these days, defining “a woman” as — well, a woman — is a very dangerous affair.

But Dahl’s case is far from being the only one. Ian Fleming’s James Bond series, as well as several other books, are being surreptitiously changed. In some cases, even the original illustrations are revamped to make them more multicultural or politically correct. And, in the case of ebooks, Amazon or other companies can change the content even after you already bought them. Which means, you don’t really own your ebooks, Amazon or Google or Apple do — another reason to prefer books in paper.

As for me, I will continue going to small bookshops and buying old books, and one day I hope to manage to have my own huge library at home, a veritable labyrinth of books, old and new. Hopefully, none of them proofread by “sensitivity readers”.

It will exponentially increase spam

I’ve recently wrote about AI, but perhaps a few more observations are in order. Recently a popular science fiction magazine had to stop accepting submissions due to the huge number of stories written via ChatGPT and similar AI services. I can only imagine what school teachers have to deal with today. When I was teaching literature at college, years ago, it was common for students to get “inspiration” from Wikipedia and similar sources, just changing a bit the wording. Although, once, a less savvy student delivered a paper which was completely copied from Wikipedia, as in Ctrl C + Ctrl V. He didn’t even took the trouble of removing the links or footnotes.

Tools like ChatGPT are harder to detect, and in fact, it is not clear if they can be considered plagiarism or not. At least the prompts are written by the students, and they can edit the final result into a more coherent form.

“I used to spend hours writing creative copy, but now all I do is tell the bot what I need and it writes everything for me. It’s the ultimate AI content writer, and a must-have tool for bloggers, marketers, & entrepreneurs”, says a satisfied customer of a new AI writing service, in a comment which may itself have been written by a bot.

It seems to me that the greatest beneficiaries of the new AI writing programs are going to be spammers. “I used to spend hours writing e-mail scams about Nigerian princes, but now I only need to give the bot a few prompts and it writes it for me, and without spelling errors!”

Now, a bot may not be capable of writing insightful prose or inspiring poetry, but it is, today, perfectly capable of writing a high school paper or journalistic articles. In fact, I assume that a lot of journalism these days, including opinion columns, is written by some form of AI. At least, they read like that. So much of modern journalism is fake, I don’t see why a robot couldn’t do it.

For instance, an article at the left-leaning site Vox assures us that there is something called “robot racism”, and that “people treat white robots better than black robots”. I kid you not. Lots of “woke” news articles read like robot prose these days.

A lot of corporate-speak also feels as if it was created by robots, even when it isn’t.

Could this article I’m writing be written by AI? Probably. But what would be the point?

Another problem of AI is that it doesn’t really save work, money or even energy, but simply transfers it somewhere else. A recent case is a pilot project for self-driving cars in San Francisco. The car can can move automatically without a driver, but it cannot automatically open or close its own doors. If a client leaves the door ajar, some worker will have to come and manually close it. Sure, I suppose new models of cars can fix this issue, but there will always be something that a human will need to do, such as fixing a flat tire or even cleaning the backseats. Besides, while the company may save on drivers, it has to hire more people to monitor the cars route, to assist customers, to do technical service and programming etc. None of those companies so far are making any money.

Perhaps AI systems for self-driving may be better used for the transport of goods than of passengers? Recently a couple of freight train derailments in Ohio, as well as a train crash in Greece, appear to have been caused by human error or bad maintenance. However, it is not clear if a totally automated system would have avoided such disasters. Machines can have bugs too, and they require constant supervision. The maintenance is done by humans too.

Then there is the question of how the growing automation of society and the reliance on AI systems will further increase social atomization in an already very socially awkward age. Most people today prefer to send messages instead of talking on the phone, or talking in person; also many people now work remotely without the need to interact with others. As AI and automation grow to occupy more and more areas of life, our contact with other humans will be further reduced. Wether that’s good or bad, I let you decide, but it is clear that human social contact will probably not increase the coming years.

One day, perhaps, we will only meet other people safely behind a screen or VR headset. And love letters will be written by ChatGPT.

23% of people in Germany and 21% in Sweden are of “migrant background”

According to a recent publication by Germany’s Federal Statistics Office (Statistisches Bundesamt) picked up by the Associated Press, 23% of the people in Germany are immigrants or children of immigrants. 17.3% or 14.1 million are themselves immigrants who have been coming since the 1950s, and another 4.7 million people (or 5.7%) are direct descendants of immigrants. That is, people who were born in Germany but both of their parents had immigrated to Germany. Then you have a further 3.7 million people (4.5%) who were born in Germany and have one parent who is an immigrant and another who is German. Therefore, only 72.5% of the people are “fully native German”. And this is not counting the recent wave of Ukrainian refugees, which may account for another 2 million people.

The numbers, if true, are really bewildering, considering that the country was 90% or more ethnic German until not long ago. (I say “if true” because they are based on a “microcensus” which is basically a survey of 1% of the population, and not a full census).

What is the source of such foreign migrants?

Well, initially most of them were Turks, who started coming in the 1960s as “guest workers” and never left. They still account for the largest number of “people with migrant background”. Then you have the Poles and Romanians who started coming after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990.

Truth be told, there is also a large contingent of ethnic Germans who were living in the Soviet Union, Poland or other Eastern European countries and came back after 1990, the so-called Aussiedler. But it is not clear to me if such people are considered “migrants” in those statistics or not, as they had a “right of return”. Yet, despite being ethnic Germans, many of them did not speak German and had problems integrating.

In 2015 and 2016 there was that well-known stampede of refugees from Syria, and Merkel opened the doors for them, so that Syrians jumped to third place, behind Turks and Poles. But now perhaps they have been surpassed by the Ukrainians, who will soon account for 1% or 2% of the total population in the country.

It’s not just Germany, of course. Sweden has 21.9% of migrants, and its case is perhaps worse, as it is a small country with a small population — meaning that their permanent replacement can happen quicker. The same is true of Ireland, with 18.7%.

Such numbers, together with the extremely low birth rates in most of the West, are very worrying for the future prospects of Europe.

Now, being myself an immigrant and descendant of immigrants, I am not a radical immigration restrictionist nor a foaming-at-the-mouth nationalist, but I do believe that people are important. What forms a nation and gives it unity? Not ideas or a constitution, as many believe now, but essentially, people. People, ideally of the same blood, language, culture and religion. Sure, some foreign migrants can be integrated, and in some ways always were — but the massive numbers that we have seen now, and continue seeing, is something unprecedented and probably unsustainable. At least, for Europe — the American continent is a slightly different story.

Besides, to me, at least, what was interesting about Europe was its diversity — a true diversity, with each country with its different food, language and talents: Germans in philosophy, Italians in art, French in literature, etc. But now, in the name of a fake “diversity”, all countries are starting to look more or less the same: full of big cities with ugly modern buildings, a multicultural population, an Americanized (or globalized) culture and a MacDonald’s and a Starbucks in every corner.

How will Europe look in a 100 years? (If there is still a European continent, or a planet Earth, by then). Well, I’m probably not going to be here to find out, but I hope and wish that most of its countries may still exist in some form or another. However, the borders of the European nations changed quite a lot in the last 1000 years, so I won’t be surprised if they further change in the next 100 too.

Artificial Intelligence is just an “intelligence simulator”

ChatGPT from Microsoft and now a similar chat bot from Google are all over the news. We also saw recent hype about “AI Art” and “AI writing”. Some people worry that soon robots and computers will take over most jobs, even creative ones. They panic that machines will one day reach “singularity”, rebel against their creators and completely dominate society.

I don’t. In fact, I don’t really believe “artificial intelligence” exists or can exist, as real intelligence is derived from consciousness, which cannot be created. With consciousness comes conscience, which allows us to distinguish right from wrong. This process cannot be generated artificially, except as a crude simulacrum — and indeed, we have now bots programmed with all kinds of politically correct filters which are, I suppose, the morality of the age. But they don’t really “think” for themselves.

All these “AI bots” can do therefore is to provide a clever simulation of intelligence, creating an appearance of something that is not really there.

That’s not to say that AI doesn’t have some uses. Unfortunately, most of such uses are negative — mas surveillance, for instance. Facial recognition, movement detection and other forms of AI based on pattern recognition can — and will — be used for pretty nefarious ends, in order to create a totalitarian state — we already felt its first birth pangs during Covid.

Then you have the planned merging of people with machines, sci-fi things like artificial organs or chips in the brain. Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, warned about this in his manifesto. They sell this as turning people into super-human cyborgs, but the real purpose is to turn people into slaves, with no control over their own body or mind.

Other uses of AI are more benign. Machine-translation, for instance, has greatly improved in the last years, providing very readable texts. However, for good, literary-quality translation, you still need a human brain.

AI automation, as in self-driving cars, planes or trains, can be useful but has some drawbacks, such as hacking, maintenance costs, and the risk of serious hardware or software malfunction at critical points. I am not sure totally autonomous self-driving cars are a good idea.

Chatbots as customer service are awful. They are really no better than pre-recorded messages on a phone. Sometimes, you really need to talk to a human, and preferably not someone from Pakistan with an incomprehensible accent.

I am not impressed by AI poems or AI art. Almost everything I saw is pretty bad or bland, with no there there. Even if AI manages one day to create something of aesthetic value, it will be in the same manner of the proverbial hundreds of monkeys typing a Shakespeare play.

That said, I am sure we will soon see humanoid robots (androids) walking around and being used as servants, companions or even sexual partners. Why? Because even if machines are incapable of real intelligence, conscience and feelings, a simulacrum is enough for most of us. Didn’t people in the 1980s get attached to “tamagotchis”, which were basically very primitive digital pets? Don’t children get attached to dolls that play just one or two pre-recorded messages? A robot or a chat bot that simulates feelings and intelligence is almost as good as the real thing. We don’t mind being fooled. Aren’t most human relationships also based on deception or self-deception anyway? We pretend all the time to be what we are not. Machines can do the same, only better.

There are many films and novels about robots becoming sentient. The last one I read was “Machines like me”, by Ian McEwan. It was pretty lame. McEwan has written some good novels over the years — unfortunately, this was not one of them. I think the problem is the chosen subject. AI is not real, and robots cannot develop self-consciousness or real intelligence. Still, in a fictional context, it could work. But McEwan is not really a science fiction writer. I think the problem is that he tries too hard to be serious about a fundamentally unserious problem, and ends up creating a novel where all characters are bad caricatures that feel very artificial. And I don’t mean just the androids.

Even Asimov cheap robot novels felt better and more realistic. At least, in my teen years, I enjoyed reading “The Caves of Steel”, “The Naked Sun” and “The Robots of Dawn”, the trilogy about a detective and a robot in a weird planet where people feel afraid of diseases and all human contact and live isolated from each other (sort of like the Earth during Covid).

AI will certainly play a pivotal role in the near future and, sure enough, it will take over many jobs. Lots of people will become unemployed, or will receive a UBI or some other type of welfare in exchange of getting a chip in the brain or a genetically-modifying injection, or both. Our society will become increasingly automated, and mass surveillance will be a constant feature.

But sentient robots will not rebel against humans and become our new overlords.

And loneliness in the “connected” modern world

Years ago, when I lived in a remote town in the south of South America, there used to be an old man who, for years, maybe decades, appeared in all vernissages, openings, receptions, cocktail parties — and basically any artistic or social event in town that offered free drinks. In some cases, even in private events (no one knows how he found out about them). But, mostly, he liked vernissages in art galleries. It is not clear if this was because of his greater interest in the visual arts than other arts, or because in those events there was usually more free booze, or, more likely, perhaps it was a healthy mixture of both. Eventually, he became so well known in such circles, that if he didn’t appear at a particular opening, it was said to bring bad luck. It meant: “This exhibition, show, book etc will fail.”

Now, living in another town in the middle of nowhere in Europe, I realize that there is an old lady that is also always present at all or most local cultural events. I don’t know if the same superstition applies to her.

Perhaps she, like that old man years ago, doesn’t have a family and feels lonely, and going to these events is a way to have some sort of social life. I don’t really know. But it got me thinking about loneliness in general.

There are studies showing that feelings of loneliness and isolation have increased immensely in the last years, and in particular since the appearance of social media and smartphones. It is as if, the more connected we are through our apps, the less connection we feel to those around us.

I was watching a movie from the early 1990s the other day, and there was a scene in which a small group of people, who clearly didn’t know each other well, were awkwardly sitting together at a table during a party. They remained silent for a while, looking at each other or at the walls, and then, almost simultaneously, they all reached for their pockets — I was expecting them to take out their smartphones, but this was an early 1990s film, so each just took out a pack of cigarettes and started smoking. Yes, you could do that indoors in the early 1990s too.

Today, of course, our smartphones make it easier for us to get lost in our own private universe and avoid the unpleasantness or awkwardness of meeting and talking with strange people “in the flesh”. Even office work has become remote in many cases, with “Zoom meetings” and similar stuff.

“Bowling alone” was a seminal essay written in 1995 by Robert Putnam, later expanded into a book. There he argued that, at least in the United States, traditional forms of social interaction such as clubs, churches, bowling leagues, etc were slowly disappearing, and people increasingly spent more time alone.

That discovery may have been a novelty in 1995, but today, and especially after Covid, it is undeniable that we live times of complete social atomization. Even inside families, sometimes there is little connection and family members spend more time looking at their phones than at each other.

Extended families living in the same household are a thing of the past. In the United States, the percentage of people living alone has increased from 6% in the 1960s to 15% in 2022. In Northern European countries such as Sweden, the number of people living alone correspond to 17.8% of the people, or 39.2% percent of all households.

The numbers keep growing every year.

Sometimes, some of these people die and it can takes days, weeks or months until they are found. In one particularly sad case, a dead man was found in his flat in Stockholm only three years after his passing — and during all this time he was still receiving welfare deposits on his bank account, every month.

It’s not just old people without families who feel lonely — apparently most teenagers and young people do, too. Depression and suicide are on the rise in most of the western world — and not only. Asia is lonely too.

The problem got so bad that the UK instituted a “Ministry of Loneliness.” And yet, knowing how government works — seeing the examples of the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Health — it is very likely that they will make the problem even worse.

But there is a solution at hand: the Canadian government’s euthanasia program already allows for anyone older than 18 years of age to receive “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAID), and there’s no need to have an incurable disease, but just “psychological suffering”. Perhaps the MAID program can merge with the Ministry of Loneliness, and governments worldwide will get rid of the problem of lonely people, once and for all.

Continuing the genealogical investigation

As promised, we continue now investigating the family origins of Mr. Klaus Schwab, the famous founder of the World Economic Forum. The genealogy site Geni confirms that Emma Gisella Schwab (née Kilian), the first wife of Eugen Schwab, is the actual mother of Klaus Schwab, solving our doubts about that issue. The first wife Emma Gisela is the biological mother, and the second wife Erika Epprecht, just the step mother.

The records of the Kilian (sometimes spelled Killian) family go way back to at least 1780, with the last known ancestor named Franz Killian (that is how far Geni goes).

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Ancestry.com informs us something interesting about the Kilian surname:

German Dutch Polish and Sorbian; Slovak (also Kilián); Czech (Kilián): from German Dutch Polish Upper Sorbian Slovak and Czech adaptations of the Irish personal name Cillín (see Killeen ). Saint Kilian was a 7th-century Irish missionary to Franconia and Thuringia martyred c. 698 at Würzburg (he is the patron saint of this German city) hence the popularity of this personal name in medieval central Europe.

All the ancestors at Geni seem to come from this region (Franconia, currently Baden-Württemberg), so that confirms it.

Therefore, Kilian is an old German name at least since medieval times, and not Irish.

Emma Gisela’s father was a Rimmler, sometimes spelled Rimler. This is also an old German name, going back at least to the 1700 as well, with Johann Heinrich Rimmler the last ancestor found in Geni. In fact, this surname could be a variation of Riemer, which is an “occupational name for a maker of leather reins and similar articles” and also common among Ashkenazi Jews in Germany (Yiddish: Rimer). The more common Reimer is another possible variation of the same name.

Then going back in the Eugen Schwab line, the last name we find in Geni is Johann Jacob Schwab, born around 1708. We have already explained the Schwab surname as that of someone from the old Swabia region, which in fact neighbours the Franconia region.

What to make of all that?

Well, mostly that Mr. Schwab is not a “nobody”, but someone with long ancestry lines from rich, traditional German families, possibly ancient nobility.

As for the constant visits of the family to Brazil, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s, this could be very likely related to the construction of the Angra dos Reis nuclear power plant in Brazil, as it started to be built in 1971, and planned before that, all with German technology. It is known that the Schwab family (through Escher-Wyss/Sulzer) was involved in the development of nuclear energy in South Africa, so it would make sense a collaboration with Brazil too.

It’s interesting that today the WEF is pushing for the construction of more nuclear reactors as a way for countries to “decarbonize” in their “battle against climate change”. Make of that what you will.

However, I stand by my previous observation that Mr. Schwab, despite his recent fame in conspiracy circles, is not really one of the main power players in the global chessboard, but basically just an “actor” or an “employee” of much more powerful people. In fact, the constant repetition of his name in the media could be just more misdirection, putting him up as some sort of scapegoat. He might not be that important, and the WEF, just another globalist institution among many.

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Why are birth rates plummeting all over the world?

Something very unusual is happening that is not being discussed very much. Global birth rates are plummeting. I even did a documentary about it, focusing on Germany and Italy, with interviews from a few years ago, pre-Covid. The problem became much worse since then, of course.

People are just not having many children anymore. In most European countries, the fertility rate is about 1.5 child per woman, and in some countries it’s around 1.3. In Italy it’s 1.24 and going down. In Japan it is also about that low, between 1.3 and 1.2, and the Japanese Prime Minister recently sounded the alarm about the problem. He said the country might cease functioning if things go on like that.

South Korea’s situation is even worse, an appalling 0.79. Russia has a TFR of 1.5, the U.S. 1.6, not a lot better. But even China is having trouble, and right now they also have sub-replacement levels. (A TFR has to be higher than 2 just to keep the same population.)

It’s not just the developed world. It’s happening in South America too (Brazil’s rate is 1.8), as well as in most of the Arab/Muslim world. The only exceptions are Israel (well, the Haredim there), then a few, still more rural regions of India (but India’s total average is 2), and subsaharan Africa, which still have higher rates, at least for now. But the rates will probably or hopefully get lower there too, as those countries urbanize more.

What is going on?

There is no single answer. Many factors seem to be the cause, including, as mentioned, urbanization (the more people live in cities, the less children they have), education (the more educated women are, the less children they have), leaving marriage and children until later (when the fertility is lower), economic/time issues (if both partners have to work, there is less time to take care of too many children), feminism and abortion (no need to explain that one), destruction of the family (lots of policies towards that end lately), loss of religious faith (religious people tend to have more children), massive immigration (it helps to lower the native birth rate), and a culture more based on individualism than on social bonds (although that is more true of Western countries than Asian ones, but both have a birthrate problem), and also some biological issues (processed foods and chemicals in the air/water reducing our “precious bodily fluids” — yes, that was a classic conspiracy theory, but it seems to be at least partially true now.

So, what is to be done?

Many so-called experts, not to mention the billionaires at Davos, keep complaining about the evils of overpopulation and “climate change”, so it would seem that less people would be a good thing. On the other hand, these same people keep pushing for more and more immigration, so it’s a bit confusing.

The main problem seems to be that average population is getting older, and someone needs to pay for the pensions and the health care of old people. If you have more old people than young people in a country, it can be a big problem. (In South Korea, some abandoned old people have to survive by rummaging through trash cans, because neither their families nor the state takes care of them).

However, this seems to be a type of Ponzi scheme that will one day crash. You see this happening in Canada. Because the number of older people has increased, the government has also increased the number of immigrants they are receiving, with a target of half a million new immigrants every year now. I suppose they will have to increase it to a million every year at some point. But then someone will have to pay for their retirement and healthcare, and so on.

From my point of view, low birth rates s a problem, but population replacement by foreigners is an even worse problem that will lead to potential conflicts later on. I can understand why a closed, insular nation like Japan prefers not to chose the road of immigration as a “solution”. It doesn’t really solve anything, and in some cases it makes things worse. Japan works because it’s Japanese. But I can’t see it functioning as a multicultural nation, like the nations in the West.

But what’s the solution then? Paying couples to have more children isn’t working either. Several countries, from Russia to Japan, have tried it, and the results are not very satisfactory. It seems that not everything is about money. (That makes sense, because in fact poor people tend to have more children than middle-class and richer people, at least in the modern world.)

I suppose shutting down education for women, as the Taliban are doing in Afghanistan, is another possible “solution”, but I don’t see it happening in the Western world. Europe had the first women in universities already in the Middle Ages, even if most of them did not attend.

You can’t force people to become more religious either, it has to be organic.

I think the most likely possibility is that at some point there will be some kind of catastrophe — a new world war, global economic depression, hunger, or maybe a new pandemic, only a real one this time — after which the current globalized world order will collapse, and then there will be a rebirth, and people will start having children again. Like when people started having children again after the Black Death, or after World War II. But yeah, that doesn’t sound so cheerful…

So perhaps there is another way?

By coincidence — but some say there are no coincidences — I’ve just found out that today is the feast of Saint Agnes. I wasn’t familiar with her story, but when I was in France, last December, I saw a medieval painting in a museum in Montpellier that called my attention. It was an anonymous painting telling the story of her martyrdom, with different scenes of her life displayed almost in the form of a comic book.

Agnes was a young woman from a rich Roman family who converted to Christianity. According to the legend, when she was 12 or 13, a spurned suitor denounced her for being a Christian, therefore, as a punishment, she was paraded nude on the streets in order to be taken to a brothel (but her hair miraculously grew to cover her, and anyone who tried to have sex with her was struck blind). Then they tried to burn her (but the fire would not catch). So they stabbed her in the throat, and she died. She has since become the patron saint of virgins. Her skull has been preserved and it can be seen displayed in the Sant’Agnese church, in Rome.

There is also a famous poem by John Keats called “The Eve of Saint Agnes“, which is inspired by the old folk belief that young maidens could see their future husband in a dream if, on the eve of Saint Agnes — that is on the night before the feast — they performed certain rituals. These could include fasting and transferring pins from a cushion to their sleeves while reciting the Lord’s Prayer, although different accounts give different rituals. Ben Jonson, one of Shakespeare’s most famous colleagues, mentions the custom in a text from 1603. John Aubrey, who seems to have been Keats’ main source, describes it in more detail in his “Miscellanies” (1696).

In Keats’ poem, the ritual is described as the young maiden going to bed without supper and then lying nude under the covers, with her head resting on a pillow and her face turned up to Heaven as she sleeps.

       They told her how, upon St. Agnes’ Eve,

       Young virgins might have visions of delight,

       And soft adorings from their loves receive

       Upon the honey’d middle of the night,

       If ceremonies due they did aright;

       As, supperless to bed they must retire,

       And couch supine their beauties, lily white;

       Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require

Of Heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire.

The idea of the maiden’s future husband appearing in a dream is interesting. Jorge Luis Borges said once (apparently referring to some quote by T. S. Eliot that I could not find), that “In the Middle Ages, when people believed in the divine origin of dreams, it made them dream better dreams”. It’s a witty saying, but I think it’s also true. Freud and psychoanalysis first demoted dreams to a mere result of sexual repression, and, for modern science, dreams are just sequences of random imagery from our brains with no ulterior meaning. Therefore, we do not have the same interest in dreams that ancient people had, and, as a result, not just our interpretation of dreams, but our dreams themselves, have become poorer.

And of course, all those curious folk rituals, not to mention the celebration of the feasts of most saints, have almost disappeared in an increasingly secular Europe, which is, in many ways, sad too. We no longer believe in saints, witches, demons or dreams — but we do believe in “global warming”, “aliens”, “fact checkers” and “gender fluidity”, so there’s that…

And how to marry a witch — two classic American films by European directors

I have trouble being consistent with my themes, but, in general, this blog is about the things I like — film, literature, travel and conspiracy theories. So this is a post about film, for a change.

I have been trying to use a bit more my Criterion Channel, which is a bit expensive, so I have been watching a few noir movies and other classic Hollywood movies from the 1930s to the 1960s. More recent productions by Hollywood are mostly propaganda and do not interest me all that much.

There are two films from the 1940s that I watched recently that might merit further comment. The particularity of many of these movies of the 1940s is that, although they were produced by American studios, they were directed by European directors who were either escaping the war, the Nazis, or who had just migrated to the U.S.

The first film is “The Woman in the Window” (1944), by Fritz Lang. Lang is one of the masters of German expressionism, and the director of one of the best silent movies of all time, which is of course “Metropolis” (1927). He moved to the U.S. when the Nazis took power, and stayed for decades in the U.S.. While he never made any other film as impactful as “Metropolis”, he directed several good noir movies and even Westerns, and had a long career in Hollywood. He returned to Germany only in 1958, where he directed a sort of sequel or reboot to his Mabuse series, “The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse” (1960), which is an interesting film in its own right.

“The Woman in the Window” is, ostensibly, a noir movie, but I would argue that is really more an anti-noir, or a reverse noir. Let me explain. In noir movies, you usually have a male protagonist with serious character flaws who meets an even more flawed woman (“femme fatale”) and together they end up committing bad deeds. The classic example would be Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity” (1944). Man falls for sinful married woman, together they decide to murder her husband and run with the insurance money. Disaster and several double-crossings ensue.

Here, instead, the main character is a quiet university professor who doesn’t really do much of anything wrong, except perhaps accepting a strange invitation, and gets involved in a death that cannot be characterized as anything other than self-defence. The supposed “femme fatale” is also pretty angelic, almost naïve, at least for film noir standards. I’d argue that she’s closer to the archetype of the “whore with the golden heart” than to the “femme fatale” archetype.

The main character is played by Edward G. Robinson. He also appears in “Double Indemnity” as the insurance investigator, and he’s great there. He’s a very interesting actor, with unusual characteristics for a leading man. After all, he is short, not muscular, not very attractive. Now, Humphrey Bogart was also short and did not have a particularly beautiful face, but he had this tough guy persona which more than made up for it. Robinson is more the nerdy, weak, intellectual type. Here he plays a professor that approaches everything, even murder, cooly and rationally. The woman is beautifully played by Joan Bennet, and, if anything, she seems even more lost and confused under the circumstances than him.

If film noir is in general about bad people doing bad things, this is more about relatively innocent people who end up mixed in bad things, and totally out of their depth, due to people much worse than themselves.

Most of the film, therefore, and the main source of suspense, is really this: what would you, an average person, do if you suddenly had to get rid of a dead body? How would you do if you had to escape from the police and avoid being blamed for a crime? I am sure everyone has thought about these important questions at least once in their life…

There is a double or really triple twist at the end of the movie that further changes its meaning, but I won’t discuss it as I don’t want to give spoilers. Let’s just say that not everybody likes the ending. But I think it works for this particular film, exactly because it is not a “real noir”. I really liked the whole thing.

The second movie I wanted to briefly comment on is “I married a witch” (1942), by French director René Clair. Contrary to Lang, René had a short career in Hollywood, directing only four movies there, then going back to France after the end of the war.

There’s no way not to give spoilers for “I married a witch”, because the film is about exactly what the title says. Anyone familiar with the “Bewitched” series from the 1960s will immediately know the basic plot. I grew up watching “Bewitched”, and it’s incredible how much the producers of that series stole from that earlier film. In fact, it seems that the only reason they were not sued for plagiarism is that both the film and the series were produced by the same studio.

Veronica Lake plays the charming witch of the title, and she’s wonderful in the role. Lake’s story is the tragic, classic Hollywood story. She had a relatively short career before succumbing to alcoholism, several divorces and personal problems. She made perhaps only a dozen films, and of those, I’d say that only three or four are still worth watching today. Two are the noir movies she made with Alan Ladd as her co-star — “The Blue Dahlia” is my favourite — and another one is Preston Sturges’ screwball classic “Sullivan’s Travels”. But, to my mind, “I married a witch” is her best.

The story, if you take it literally, is pretty silly, and in the hands of another, less skillful director, would probably fail. But René Clair, perhaps because he’s French, brings a certain je ne sais quoi to the movie that elevates it beyond its own silliness. The gags work, the characters work, and the whole thing is as charming as a witch’s love spell.

Friedrich March plays the male counterpart. He’s not particularly memorable, but the role calls for someone who’s a bit more of a passive character, if not even a bit of a bumbling idiot, for Lake to have fun with. The “devil” father of the witch is played with gusto by Cecil Kellaway. I wasn’t expecting much from this movie, to be honest, but I ended up really enjoying it.

This is it for today. Next post is going to be about conspiracy stuff again, don’t worry.

A genealogical investigation of the Bond villain’s mysterious origins

Very few people have heard about the obscure French writer Marcel Schwob, but many have heard about the infamous WEF chairman, Mr. Klaus Schwab. And yet it was a commentary related to the similarity of both surnames which led me through this rabbit hole.

Although Mr. Klaus Schwab has been around for a long time, he rose to prominence in conspiracy theory circles mainly during the Covid era, when he argued that the pandemic was a perfect opportunity for a “Great Reset”.

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He dresses and talks like a Bond villain and organizes yearly meetings in Davos when world leaders convene to decide the future of the world. (This year’s meeting is starting today.) He is a big proponent of transhumanism, and among other things the WEF is one of the main sponsors of Israeli writer Yuval Harari, transhumanist extraordinaire and author of “Homo Deus”. (Now that’s an interesting title, supposedly a play on Homo Sapiens, but it could also be interpreted as “Homo(sexual) God”. Harari is of course homossexual, “married” to another man and a big proponent of “human hacking” through “under the skin technology” that may include chips, vaccines and genetic manipulation.)

But back to Klaus. Half of the people in conspiracy theory boards suspect him of being a closet Nazi, and the other half suspect him of being a closet Jew. Neither appear to be exactly correct: the truth is more mysterious and more complicated.

In any case, he has strange family origins. Wikipedia says he’s the son of Eugen Wilhelm Schwab and Erika Epprecht. He himself lists Erika as his mother in the preface of a book. However, according to genealogy sites Wiki Tree and Family Search, Erika is actually the second wife of Eugen, and they “married about 1938 [location unknown], [children unknown]”.

Now, 1938 is also the official birth year of Mr. Schwab, so was Erika already pregnant with little Klaus before the marriage? Or was she just the stepmother, and he was actually the child of Eugen’s first wife?

The first wife is Emma Gisela Kilian, which doesn’t tell us much. Kilian appears to be an Irish surname. The site mentions that “She emigrated to the USA on December 9th, 1938.” Escaping from the Nazis? Or some other reason? Was this just after the divorce or separation from Eugen? But Klaus is registered as having been born in March 1938, so she still could be the mother.

Some say Emma was Jewish, but, it’s not clear it is so. If anything, the father’s surname, Schwab, is more linked to Jewish origins: “German and Jewish (Ashkenazic): habitational name for someone from Swabia (German Schwaben)”.

As I mentioned at the beginning, French writer Marcel Schwhob was Jewish, from the region of Alsace — which is now in France, but was at one point part of the same Swabia region in Germany, which explains the surname.

Eugen Schwab and Emma Gisela are listed in Wiki Tree as having “at least” two children, neither of them, however, is our “Santa” Klaus. We have the names of Ulrich Schwab and Hans Ernst Schwab.

The second wife, Erika, has no children listed.

Klaus Schwab has no record, neither in Wiki Tree nor in Family Search. Weird.

The Schwab family is listed as living and having roots both in Switzerland and in Germany. Eugen worked for a Swiss company, Escher Wyss, which, according to Wikipedia, “during WWII, the company was a supplier for the German war effort, manufacturing turbines for Norsk Hydro, and supplying flamethrowers. Additionally, the company was an integral part of researching and developing turbines to produce heavy water for the creation of nuclear weapons for the Nazis.” That’s why the family moved to Ravensburg, Germany, at some point during the 1930s, but then went back to neutral Switzerland before the end of the war. Klaus started his primary school in Zurich, this would have been in 1944/1945, but then the family returned to Ravensburg after the war.

Interestingly, the Scwhab family seems to have migrated to Brazil in the 1960s. Although old Eugen returned to Germany, at least Hans seems to have made Brazil his permanent home.

Why Brazil? It is not clear. The family appears to be moving between Brazil and Germany constantly during this period, with several entries and exits recorded from the 1950s until the 1970s. Hans is listed as an engineer, like his father Eugen, who “specialized in the manufacture of turbines and equipment for the Wehrmacht” during World War II.

The first entry of the family in Brazil appears to be in 1957, coming from Ravensburg, Germany. According to Wikipedia, Klaus, then 19, finished school and took his Abitur exam in Ravensburg that same year.

However, while the rest of the family for some reason started moving between Germany and Brazil, Klaus went to study in Switzerland. He graduated in 1961. Continuing the family tradition, he also graduated in Engineering, but afterwards took a doctorate in Business.

Did he stay in Switzerland with Eugen’s second wife, Erika, the woman who raised him? According to Wikipedia, she was Swiss. Or was he living alone from a young age? We are still not sure if Erika’s his actual mother or stepmother, nor where she lived at the time. Very little appears in the genealogy sites about Erika.

Interestingly, there is a record of the marriage of Eugen Schwab and Emma Kilian Jekelius in 1926 (Jekelius was the surname of her first husband, from which she divorced, Kilian was her single name). But there’s no record of the second marriage with Erika Epprecht.

So, we still don’t know for sure whether Klaus was the son of Eugen’s first or second wife. We also don’t know why they went to Brazil so many times. And where did all the family’s money came from? They seem to be very rich, but engineers are, in general, not that rich. Was the Swiss part of the family connected to bankers?

So, we are still very much in the dark. Perhaps this work will need to be complemented with a second part. The investigation will continue… Stay tuned.

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