“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke

“Poetry is the arbitrary production of errors.” Anne Carson

“The day you’re born is not the day you grow, it’s the day you evolve. The revolution is up to you.” Goitsemang Mvula

“Almost half a millennium before the concept of counterfactual thinking emerged in cognitive psychology, Montaigne understood that thoughts of danger stress us much more than the danger itself.” —From Burn On: Always on the verge of burn out. The unrecognized suffering and what helps against it, by Bert te Wildt and Timo Schiele

Australian Anthropophages

Only thirty thousand Indigenous Australians survived the first wave of British invasions from 1778 to 1805. They encountered the damned of Great Britain—mainly slum youths. The Crown exported its youth bulge.

The American entrepreneur Robert A. Cunningham (1837–1907) exhibited Aboriginal people in “ethnographic shows” as Australian cannibals.

Quotes from Alexander Kluge, Circus / Kommentar, Suhrkamp

Cunningham brought two groups to their triumph in Europe. The second group included Jenny, King Bill, and King William II. Kluge describes the maximum exploitation of the so-called “savages,” linking Cunningham’s colonial arrogance to historical events in his hometown of Halberstadt:

“Seven years before my father was born, at a time outside my own life experience, Cunningham presented a group of Australian natives he had assembled … at the Hotel Kaiserhof in March 1885.”

Displayed certificates of authenticity “proved” the accuracy of the breathtaking biographical information. The exhibited figures likely had the highest visual appeal in the world. Their portrayal as (legendary) life-threatening cannibals in chains surpassed African exoticism.

“Rudolf Virchow, the anatomical idol of Humboldt University, examined the ‘rarities’ scientifically. All sorts of luminaries enhanced the aura of the displayed. Their staging followed a choreography. Authenticity was a chimera on the horizon of deception.”

A thousand visitors saw the exhibition daily. Halberstadt was the spa capital at the Harztor. A fluctuating flow of spa guests guaranteed Cunningham a large audience. He ran his business with tormented souls. The Australians, treated like serfs, wandered traumatized through the galaxies of modernity. They came from a clan that “had been wiped out from the visible world of Australia” in a rapid process of destruction. Cunningham did not own the professional “savages” as slaves … he had “the exclusive right to use them.”

On All Saints’ Day, 1755

The great earthquake in Lisbon claimed thirty thousand lives instantly. Goethe summed up the blessing in disguise:

“And the luckiest of them is the one who is no longer allowed to feel or reflect on the disaster.”

The event shaped the trajectory of enlightened discourse on disasters. It transformed European thinking, especially against the backdrop that, although almost everything sank into the earth, the red-light district of Alfama was spared. The district, originally a Moorish settlement, stood higher than the rest of the city. While the cathedrals collapsed under the fury of a triple attack—earthquake, tsunami, fire—the brothels resisted on their rocky foundations.

As the full extent of the Portuguese devastation became clear, people were dancing in Paris. Voltaire first recognized this simultaneity. For Goethe, the news of the earthquake and the accompanying “movement of water” (Immanuel Kant)—the tsunami—was a key experience:

“The extraordinary world event, however, shook the boy’s peace of mind to its core for the first time.” —From From my life. Poetry and truth

Voltaire wrote empathetically:

“Deceived philosophers. You shout: ‘Everything is fine!’ He advised the community: Come here and see for yourself. Look at the disaster… the smoldering ruins and the limbs that have been blown off.”

Voltaire lost faith in the simultaneous existence of harmless sociability and mass death.