Dr. Konrad Ratz (December 20, 1931 - May 22, 2014)

I was very saddened to learn of the death of my friend, Dr. Konrad Ratz, translator, researcher, and writer whose contributions to our understanding of Maximilian von Habsburg and Mexico's Second Empire I admire more than I can say. Among his many works, all of them major contributions:

Tras las huellas de un desconocido: Nuevos datos y aspectos de Maximiliano de Habsburgo (Link goes to my note in English about this excellent and very illuminating book.)

Los viajes de Maximiliano de Maximiliano en México(co-authored with Amparo Gómez Tepexicuapan)(Link goes to my comments for the book's presentation in Chapultepec Castle, Mexico City.)

Correspondencia inédita entre Maximiliano y Carlota

El ocaso del imperio de Maximiliano visto por un diplomático prusiano

Maximilian und JuárezBand I Das Zweite Mexikanische Kaiserreich und die RepublikBand II Querétaro-Chronik

The musical:
http://www.myspace.com/maximilian1867http://www.myspace.com/maximilianoycarlota

Very few researchers can work in both Spanish and German, fewer still with the skills to research Mexico's most complex and transnational period of the 19th century. We are fortunate indeed that Dr. Ratz dedicated so much effort and so many of his years to these tasks.

From the note his son Wolfgang sent out (my translation from the Spanish):

He began his professional life in Bilbao as a translator for the automobile industry. After moving with his family to Vienna, he worked for many years as an economist and translator for the Austrian Chamber of Commerce. Following that, as Director of the Fund to Promote Research, he had the opportunity to support many innovative projects and young entrepreneurs. He also worked to help create similar institutions in various countries, among them, Mexico. In 1975 he received the Austrian Decoration for Arts and Science.

... As a historian, he dedicated his life to researching Maximilian von Habsburg, and especially so during his retirement when he considered Mexico his "adopted country" and spent many marvelous years there with his second wife, Herta, making many unforgettable friendships.

Throughout his life, music was a great passion. The musical "Maximiliano - el Sueño de una Corona" was debuted successfully in Querétaro and Mexico City.

Open to all cultures, his life created bridges among Austria, Spain, Switzerland, and Latin America.

COMMENTS always welcome.

Los viajes de Maximiliano en México (Maximilian's Travels in Mexico) by Konrad Ratz and Amparo Gómez Tepexicuapan

Amparo Gómez Tepexicupan
Co-autora de Los viajes de Maximiliano en México
Foto de CONACULTA

Herewith (below), my comments for the presentation of Konrad Ratz and Amparo Gómez Tepexicuapan's Los viajes de Maximiliano en México (Maximilian's Travels in Mexico) in Mexico City's Chapultepec Castle yesterday. A magnificent, meticulously researched and beautifully designed book, Los viajes de Maximiliano en México is a major contribution to our understanding of not only his government but the period, and as such it deserves to be in any and every collection of Maximiliana.

(For those of you not familiar with Mexican book presentations, these tend to be rather formal affairs with three to as many as five speakers, a podium with microphones, and so on.)

Querida Amparo; compañeros comentaristas; Señoras y Señores:

Antes que nada, quisiera agradecer la muy amable invitación para participar en la presentación de este magnífico libro, sin duda en un inmejorable escenario. Para mi tiene un doble significado este evento: primero, es un tributo a los autores, a quienes respeto profundamente en lo profesional y personal, y aprovecho este instante para mandarle mis mejores deseos al Dr Ratz , quien no ha podido estar presente aquí por motivos de salud; y segundo, por la profundidad con que se aborda el tema mismo del libro.

Como dice el refrán, nunca es tarde si la dicha es buena. Pero esto no quita que hubiera apreciado inmensamente haber tenido a mi disposición este libro, investigado meticulosamente y documentado e ilustrado maravillosamente, cuando estaba en el proceso de escribir mi novela.

Como saben todos quienes se meten a estudiar este periodo, el Segundo Imperio o Intervención francesa, fue un episodio de la historia mexicana verdaderamente transnacional: ahí tenemos al archidique austriaco, el ejército francés, tenemos empresarios y banqueros ingleses, norteamericanos, todo tipo de mexicanos, tanto condes como indígenas y belgas y húngaros y hasta la reina Victoria y el Papa... Para poder investigar a fondo, uno tiene que leer cartas, informes y libros no solamente en castellano, francés y alemán, sino también en inglés y en ocasiones sería deseable—y en mi casi no fue posible— en portugués, italiano o húngaro. Aparte de esta Torre de Babel, las costumbres, filosofias e incentivos de tan diversos protagonistas, tanto mexicanos como extranjeros, son muy dificil de tomar con seriedad. Nada más para dar un ejemplo entre cientos, para quizá cada uno nosotros, nacidos en el siglo XX, ciudadanos de una república, ya sea Mexico o en mi caso, los Estados Unidos, cuando leemos el tomo escrito por Maximiliano y Carlota durante su traslado a México, nuestra inclinación natural es de reír. Estoy hablando del Reglamento y ceremonial de la corte en el cuál se especifica hasta el color de los calcetines de los meseros, a quién le toca un cojín de terciopelo en tal ceremonia y a quién no. No obstante, en el contexto del mundo de esta pareja, es decir, el Europa de aquel entonces en donde los rituales monárquicos, con su énfasis en demostrar y hasta intimidar con su riqueza, orden y poder, dicho reglamento tiene un perfecto sentido.

A esta complejidad más que bizantina de este periodo añadimos el hecho de que Maximiliano y Carlota viajaban casi constantamente. . . .  CONTINUAR

>>For much more about books, documents and sundry items pertaining to this tumultuous period of Mexican history, I invite you to visit my other blog.

The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, by Anne-Marie O'Connor

The other day I participated on a panel -- this is the traditional Mexican format for such things-- presenting Anne Marie O'Connor's wonder of a new book, The Lady in Gold, at Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes. Fellow panelists were Irene Hemer, Alberto Hijar and Luz Maria Sanchez, and serving as moderator, my favorite biographer, Michael K. Schuessler. In the audience: (wow!) Elena Poniatowska.

Here's the English version of what I said in Spanish:

I don’t remember the first time I saw Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Probably, I was in highschool in California, probably I saw it in a book or as a postcard. It would have been titled, as the Austrians had retitled it during the Nazi period, Lady in Gold, with no further ado about its subject.

Of course I remembered the painting. Who could forget the Austrian Mona Lisa, stunning as a Byzantine icon, and that face – the face of belle époque Vienna—so elegantly intelligent, poised above a river of eyes of Horus?

My generation was born into a world where the adults had lived through World War II.  In 1941, my father was a little boy in the suburbs outside New York City and, as he told me many times, he was with my grandmother, as she was hanging up the laundry to dry, when the radio blared out the news of Pearl Harbor.

Veterans, survivors of POW camps, survivors of the Holocaust—these might be family, neighbors, a teacher, the owner of the shop on the corner. They were scattered everywhere, though these terrible times, the terrible things, were not subjects for everyday conversation. I never dared to ask my godfather, who was strangely calm, what he witnessed as a medic with General Patton in the Battle of the Bulge. I did not know until she was very elderly and had suffered a stroke, and I could no longer ask her about it, that my highschool French and German teacher, who had loved to sing "La Vie en Rose" on her guitar, had served as one of Herman Goering’s translators during the Nuremburg Trials.

For those of you young enough to not know, Hermann Goering was commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, the Third Reich’s Air Force, and Hitler’s designated successor. Condemned to death by hanging for his war crimes, in 1946, he committed suicide in his cell by taking cyanide.

So, though I was born 16 years after its end, as it has been for many of my generation in many countries, World War II was always very close, very vivid. But now that so many of its eyewitnesses have passed away, the vividness is moving from living memories to containers of memories, that is, to books.

Books: the capsules that carry the information, the stories of what it means to be human, across time and space. 

The literature on World War II, already almost unimaginably vast, continues to grow. Just to give you an inkling, my father, Roger Mansell, after retiring, dedicated some 20 years to amassing a library and data base on the POWs of the Japanese in the Pacific. Many of these horrific stories of torture and slave labor for Japanese corporations had been suppressed by the U.S. government and by the 90s, the Cold War over, many of the by then elderly survivors were avid to talk. The collection of books and documents and interviews took over his office, and then the house and the garage and I am quite sure my mother breathed a sigh of relief when Stanford University’s Hoover Institution accepted the donation of his archive. Since my father passed away in 2010, uncountable numbers of books have been published on the war in the Pacific, and his own, titled Captured: The Forgotten Men of Guam, will be published this fall by Naval Institute Press. The POWs of the Japanese in the Pacific was but one subspecialty: World War II touched almost every corner of the planet, including, of course, Mexico. And not to go on about my father’s very interesting and important research. Where I’m going with this is to say that in the ever-flowing Amazon-sized River of literature about World War II, its many theaters of action and its many genres and topics, Anne-Marie O’Connor’s The Lady in Gold, about the creation, theft, fight for, and return of an Austrian masterpiece, has a very special place. 

Not only does The Lady in Gold read like the best of novels, with polished prose and a well-structured narrative—richly delicious—  oh! I cannot resist the comparison—as a Viennese pastry— but it’s author, a seasoned journalist, dedicated many years to original and exhaustive research. Having spent some seven years researching my own book, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire or, El último príncipe del Imperio Mexicano, a novel based on the true story of Maximilian von Habsburg’s court, I know the tedium—and the joys—of fingering through archives, and mulling, sometimes over weeks, months and even years, puzzles, questions that themselves sometimes take eons to even formulate.

Know that when you hold Anne-Marie O’Connor’s book is your hand, you are holding a treasure. A treasure about a treasure. 

It might seem curious that we are here today in Mexico speaking in Spanish about a book written in English about an Austrian work of art. And yet, as every Mexican schoolchild knows, Mexico’s history intertwines with Austria’s. The French Intervention,  which installed the Austrian Archduke, Maximilian von Habsburg, as Emperor of Mexico, is the the elephant that lumbered through the middle of Mexico’s 19th century.

Gustav Klimt was born in 1862—the year the French were still battling for Puebla and Maximilian, in his castle in Trieste, recently removed from his position as commander of Austria’s navy—  and only 5 years from his death in Mexico— looked out over the gray Adriatic and mulled over his mysterious future. 

The Vienna of Klimt, of Adele Bloch-Bauer and her family, the cosmopolitan, highly cultured Vienna that would be a shadow of itself after World War I: This would have been the Vienna of Maximilian, had he lived.

Maximilian was born in 1832 in Schonbrunn Palace, Vienna—next to the Café Tivoli, where, but a few decades later, Gustav Klimt would take his daily breakfast before heading off to paint in his studio. Maximilian would have been 30 years old when Gustav Klimt appeared in this world, into his Vienna. Habsburg Vienna. Let us keep this simple fact in the forefront: 

It was Maximilian’s older brother, Franz Joseph, who ruled the empire from 1848 until his death as a very old man on the eve of World War I 

O’Connor evokes the old Vienna in so many ways… For example, her description of Adele Bauer-Bloch’s heir, the elderly Maria Altmann, as she appeared on television only a few years ago:
p. 236 

“She spoke the poetic, Italian German of the Habsburg empire, with flourishes, courtesies, and the instinctive impulse—even in open conflict—to be charming. It was like a magic spell, this lilting, delicate dialect, and it was all but extinct now.” 

It is not hard to imagine Maximilian, by his brother’s side, as Franz Joseph awarded the young Gustav Klimt the Golden Service Cross. I can imagine Maximilian admiring Klimt’s early murals for the Empress Elisabeth’s Hermes Palace—for the Empress Elisabeth, or Sisi, was not only Maximilian’s sister-in-law, she was Maximilian’s friend. Shortly before sailing to Mexico, Maximilian had escorted Sisi on a cruise to Corfu.

Maximilian loved art and music, he spoke many languages, traveled afar—Egypt, Portugal, and to his Habsburg cousin's empire, Brazil. He relied on an entourage almost as eclectic as the Habsburg empire itself, and famously, his last doctor, Samuel Basch, and one of his closest advisors, Baron Stefan von Herzfeld, were Jewish.

Had he lived, I think Maximilian would been charmed by – and perhaps even championed Klimt’s work, and, at the age of 76, brilliantly white-bearded and perhaps leaning a little on his cane, gazed upon The Portrait of Adele Bauer-Bloch, as I do, with genuine wonder, genuine admiration. 

My one and only criticism of Anne Marie O’Connor’s The Lady in Gold, which is really more an expression of admiration and enthusiasm, is that it is not already available in Spanish.

--Read in Spanish, Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, September 18, 2012

Dr Konrad Ratz Today @ 17:00 in the National Palace, Mexico City

Dr Konrad Ratz has translated a profoundly important work for understanding Maximilian's Mexican adventure and gruesome end: The reports of the Prussian Ambassador to Mexico, Baron von Magnus, to Otto von Bismarck. Those who are aficionados of the period will know that Baron Magnus was the only diplomat who witnessed Maximilian's execution in 1867. Dr Ratz found Magnus's reports in the archives in Berlin. . . CONTINUE READING.

Language Overlay: A Technique of Fiction

Continuing the series of an every other week-ish post on creative writing:

One of the simplest and yet most effective techniques of fiction is "langage overlay." I first learned about this from the Canadian novelist Douglas Glover. In his essay, "The Novel as Poem," (in Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Oberon, 1999), Glover talks about how he dramatically improved the original draft of his first novel with this technique:

My first person narrator was a newspaperman, he had printer's ink in his blood. [I went] through the novel, splicing in words and images, a discourse, in other words, that reflected my hero's passion for the newspaper world. So, for example, Precious now begins: "Jerry Menenga's bar hid like an overlooked misprint amid a block of jutting bank towers..." Or, in moments of excitement, the narrator will spout a series of headlines in lieu of thoughts.

The key word here is "passion." What is in your character's world that he or she would feel passionate about? There's not a linear formula to follow; just take a piece of paper and jot down any nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, phrases, concepts-- in short, whatever pops into your mind that might do.

For example, if your character is a doctor, perhaps her world might include:

stethoscope, Rx, nurse, pills, scalpel, sterile, billing, paperwork, white coat, bedside manner, cold corridors, patient, tubes, IV, tongue depresser, "Say 'ahhh!'"

If your character is a chef, perhaps:

skillet, toque, cooking school, spices, basil, aroma, seasoned, blisters on hands, oven mitt, scalloped potatoes, seared, grilled, boiled, steamed, souffle, sweating in a hot kitchen, hsssss of sausage hitting the oil, Salvadorean pot-washers, waiters, paté, fois gras, freshness, crispness, apron

And surely, with a few minutes and pencil you can add another 10 to 100 more items.

But to continue, let's say your character is a beekeeper:

Bees, hives, smoker, sunshine, blossoms, clover, lavender, moths, gnats, sting, hive tool , veil, gloves, seasons, orchards, Queen, drone, worker, nectar, pollen, propolis, furry, wings, extractor, candles, farmer's markets, bottles, pans, wax, comb, jars, raspberry, apple, recipes, candy, pesticides, "ouch!" mites, cold, wind, directions, forest, nature

Or a shaman:

drum, flutes, shells, spells, chimes, stones, nature, mmm-bb-mmmm-bb, animals, wolves, robes, chants, tent, walking, dancing, running, wind, rain, sun, moon, stars

A writing conference organizer (this went over with a few chuckles at the San Miguel Writers Conference last year):

Internet, paper, books, authors, per diem, agents, writers, money, volunteers, hotel, telephone, e-mail, facebook, "what's he published?"

Of course you needn't incorporate everything on your list anymore than you would eat everything laid out on a smorgasboard. Browse, sniff, nibble, gorge, ignore-- as you please.

To give you an example from my own writing: one of the main characters in my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, is Maximilian von Habsburg, the Austrian archduke who became Mexico's ill-fated second emperor. One of the techniques I used to find my way into his point of view was, precisely, language overlay. Before coming to Mexico, Maximilian had served as an admiral in the Austrian Navy, so no doubt he would have used or oftentimes thought of such words as:

starboard, deck, batten the hatches, gimbles, compass, bridge, wake...

In short, I made a long messy-looking list and kept it pinned to the bulletin board by my desk. I also used a Thesaurus, adding terms I didn't think of right away: "kedge" was one. So I had a scene where, in land-locked Mexico City of 1866, Maximilian informs his aide that they're going on a brief vacation to Cuernavaca. "We'll just kedge over there..." Ha! Kedge! One of those perfectly precise words that makes novelists unhunch from their laptops, raise both fists and shout, YEEEE-AH!!! Which, you can be sure, will startle the dog.

The exercise I always give my writing workshop students:

First make your language list for the doctor. Then, in 5 minutes (about a paragraph), have him take a cooking class.


Douglas Glover's essay "The Novel As Poem" is such an important one for any creative writer to read, I would recommend buying the collection, Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, for that alone-- but the collection does in fact include many other excellent and illuminating essays. Visit the publisher's website here.

UPDATE: I'm teaching "Techniques of Fiction" for the San Miguel Writers Workshop in San Miguel de Allende in February 2012. Read more about that here.
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P.S. For a free copy of my e-book "C.M. Mayo on Creative Writing: The Best from the Blog," a fully formatted PDF download, which can be read in iBooks, click here. My workshop schedule can be found here. Most recent podcast for writers: Decluttering Your Writing: The Interior Decoration Analogy.