Word: sebastian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Like Samuel Butler's Erewhon, Thomas Berger's principality of Saint Sebastian can be found on no map, but its significance will be clear to any reader with a sufficiently jaundiced eye. Tucked away in Middle Europe, somewhere between Johann Strauss's Vienna and Kafka's Prague, the country subsists on a precarious economy of universal credit. Politics and journalism are against the law; pederasty is condoned, but rudeness is considered a crime against the state. The government bureaucracy includes the absurdly named Ministry of Clams, a sort of dead-letter office for all insoluble problems, whose minister believes that...
...those who would rather not think about World War II, or the cold war either, one of the main events of the year is the 300th birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach.* Anyone who missed the St. Matthew Passion in Bach's hometown of Leipzig on his actual birthday, March 21, can sample Bach festivals in Hamburg, Berlin, Heidelberg and Stuttgart, as well as the nine-day Bachanalia on the island of Madeira in June. And if this seems a surfeit of baroque music, remember that June 16 is Bloomsday in Dublin, when admirers of James Joyce spend 18 hours retracing...
Today, there are daily traffic jams in Harvard Square, Derek C. Bok is Harvard's President, and Harvard is celebrating Johann Sebastian Bach's 300th birthday...
...read music like most children read books, if your family played music together the way others play baseball, if you wanted to grow up to be a musician instead of an astronaut, you could be Johann Sebastian in Bach...or you could be Christoph Wolff, Chairman of the Music Department...
...remainders of German defeat, shame and partition are visible everywhere, is finding cultural solace and renewed pride in its heroes and native sons. In 1983, on the 500th anniversary of his birth, East Germany celebrated Martin Luther. Today, in their tercentenary year, it praises George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach, the two greatest composers of the Baroque. Here, where the lives and paths of such men as Luther, Handel, Bach, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Richard Wagner intersect, the glory, unity and tragedy of German history are a living memory...