90 Second Narratives
90 Second Narratives
A Season of Stories 9: Friendship
This special episode combines all the stories from Season 9…
“Becoming a Friend of God in Eighteenth-Century North Africa” – Dr. Zachary Wright, Associate Professor of History and Religious Studies at Northwestern University in Qatar
“Posthumous Friendships between Jesuit Brothers” – Dr. Ulrike Strasser, Professor of History at the University of California San Diego
“Life’s Seasons and the Friendships of Frederick the Great” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston, Associated Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) Mainz
“Otto von Bismarck’s Four-Legged Friends” – Dr. Claudia Kreklau, Associate Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews
“Narragansett Friendship, Roger Williams, and Religious Freedom in America” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston
“The Friendship that Introduced a Heroine of Mexican Independence to the World” – Dr. Silvia Marina Arrom, Jane’s Professor of Latin American Studies Emerita in the History Department at Brandeis University
“On the Doors of the U.S. Supreme Court” – Dr. Sky Michael Johnston
90 Second Narratives
Season 9: “Friendship”
Episode 9: “A Season of Stories 9: Friendship”
Sky Michael Johnston:
Welcome 90 Second Narratives, the podcast that brings you “little stories with BIG historical significance.” Today is a special Season of Stories episode featuring all the stories from Season 9 which has the theme of friendship. I’m Sky Michael Johnston, the host and creator of the podcast. Let’s get right to the stories. Our first storyteller is Dr. Zachary Wright and his story is called, “Becoming a Friend of God in Eighteenth-Century North Africa.” After him, you will hear Dr. Ulrike Strasser share the story, “Posthumous Friendships between Jesuit Brothers.”
Zachary Wright:
“The true scholar,” the 18th-century North African Sufi master Shaykh Ahmad al-Tijani told his disciples, “is the one who gives form to what is clear, and clarifies what is ambiguous, and this from the strength of his knowledge, the breadth of his understanding, the soundness of his spiritual vision (naẓr) and his verification (taḥqīq).” While it appears that political fragmentation and corruption, along with the alleged moral decay of ordinary people were everywhere witnessed in the Muslim world in the eighteenth century, less appreciated has been the dynamic efforts of a self-confident Islamic intelligentsia to respond to the perceived crises of their age. The Tijaniyya, the Sufi order or network of Islamic mystical realization spread by Shaykh Ahmad Tijani in Algeria and Morocco from 1782 to 1815, has since become one of the largest Islamic learning communities in the world, with tens of millions of followers particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. The reason for this appeal was the offer of personal religious realization, or taḥqīq, that the Tijaniyya offered to Muslims of all backgrounds, allowing them to transcend the unprecedented corruption of a new age of human history.
On the basis of constant companionship with the spiritual presence of the Prophet Muḥammad beyond the grave, Shaykh Ahmad al-Tijani assured followers that his “Muhammadan way” (tariqa Muhammadiyya) connected them to the enduring light of the Prophet and could thus transform the least of them into the beloved friends of God. This emphasis on religious realization or transformative actualization (tahqiq) was a discourse that pervaded eighteenth-century Islamic thought and extended to fields of Quran learning, hadith study, jurisprudence, theology, talismanic esotericism, and most certainly to Sufism. Perhaps most intriguingly, tahqiq connected individuals with the latent potentiality of their own souls, endowed with divine gnosis since the beginning of creation, and thus generated insight into the internal condition of all humans. Shaykh al-Tijani thus observed, “There is no difference between a believer and a non-believer in terms of their humanity.” This essential human spirit explained God’s “general love” for all of humanity: “All the worlds are included in this love,” al-Tijani explained, “even the disbelievers, for they are His beloveds at God’s words, ‘I loved to be known, so I created all of creation and made Myself known to them, and by Me they know Me.’” With ensuing colonial conquest and the erasure of distinct boundaries between peoples and cultures in an increasingly globalized world, perhaps the Tijaniyya has been so successful for its perceived ability to offer a vision of human interaction and individual Islamic actualization independent of political or other worldly affiliation.
Ulrike Strasser:
Today a flight from Prague to Guam covers an aerial distance of over 7,100 miles and takes about 15 hours. The journey may seem far, long, and cumbersome to many travelers. Yet today’s challenges pale when compared to those faced in 1678 by Augustinus Strobach, a Jesuit from Bohemia. Strobach journeyed to Guam on land and sea routes via Spain and the Americas across some 15,000 miles, over half of the earth’s circumference. In 1682 or four years later, he finally arrived in Guam.
What made this man from Central Europe undertake such an arduous journey to the Pacific in the late seventeenth century? There was no shortage of other missionary opportunities, some of them much closer to home. The Jesuit order commanded the largest transnational network at the time, more extensive than that of any empire. So what set the Bohemian on his course to a remote island on the other side of the world?
Two Jesuits brethren he never met in the flesh, but befriended in spirit. Most immediately, there was a Spanish Jesuit named Diego de Sanvitores. Sanvitores had founded the Guam mission back in 1668 and was killed for the faith in 1671. Catholics around the Pacific and in Europe hailed him as a martyr. Augustinus Strobach in Bohemia was deeply moved by Sanvitores’s fate – and fame – to go evangelize in Guam.
If the Spanish Sanvitores inspired the Bohemian Strobach, yet another man, from yet another place, and dead even longer, deeply inspired both Jesuits. A year after the order’s founding, in 1541 Francis Xavier from Portugal became the first Jesuit missionary ever to venture beyond Europe. He made converts in India, Japan, and today’s Indonesia. Xavier’s big dream of bringing the faith to China, however, ended abruptly in 1552 as he died on an island near the Chinese coast.
Generations of Jesuits adored and longed to be like Xavier – the way a good friend can bring out the best versions of oneself. Over a century after his death, the Spaniard Sanvitores and the Bohemian Strobach in Guam imitated Xavier daily in action, speech, and mannerisms, so much so that contemporaries dubbed each one of them a ‘second Xavier.’ Homo-social affection thus connected men across time and space. Spiritual friendship enabled the Jesuits’ phenomenal global expansion. Again and again, affective ties among men – living and dead – generated in individuals a desire to seek “the sacred” in faraway places. Sometimes as far away as Guam from Prague.
Sky Michael Johnston:
Our first two stories shared the theme of religion. These next two take us to Prussia for an interesting look into the personal lives of some of the most important political figures in Central Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. First, I share the story, “Life’s Seasons and the Friendships of Frederick the Great.” Then, Dr. Claudia Kreklau shares the story, “Otto von Bismarck’s Four-Legged Friends.”
Sky Michael Johnston:
Many long-term friendships change over time with the seasons of life. This was certainly true in the case of Frederick II, King of Prussia, known as Frederick the Great. Frederick is remembered for successfully pursuing friendships with many of the pre-eminent artists and thinkers of the Enlightenment. While still just the crown prince, Frederick initiated a life-long relationship with the French philosopher, Voltaire, via letters. Another friend of Frederick’s in these years was Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff. In contrast to the pen-pal relationship between Frederick and Voltaire, Knobelsdorff spent considerable time with Frederick. Together, they collaborated on robust architectural projects.
Although it was expected, Frederick experienced a greater change in life’s circumstances than most people do when he ascended the throne of Prussia in 1740 at age 28. Access to greater resources for pursuing his artistic interests and greater freedom after the death of his father was tempered by the new responsibilities of his position. His attention to Knobelsdorff waned at this time which caused a strain on the relationship between two men with strong personalities. Nevertheless, Knobelsdorff was still well-supported and is known today as a leading figure of the Frederician Rococo style seen in the ornate design and decoration of architectural structures including Charlottenburg Palace.
Frederick’s relationship with Voltaire seemed to move in the opposite direction after 1740. Finally, the two met in person culminating in Voltaire moving to Frederick’s home of Potsdam in 1750. Once again, however, the personalities of the two figures were too big to fit under a single roof. By 1753 Voltaire left Prussia. Before long, Frederick and Voltaire settled in once again, to a friendship that was carried through the exchange of letters. Through their ups and downs, these two friendships had significant impacts on the culture of eighteenth-century Europe.
Claudia Kreklau:
Historians like to say, everything has a history. Recently, the history of animals, has seen some development. The history of dogs, living closely beside humans for millennia as guards, workers, hunting aids and companions, illustrates a relationship with nature over time and sheds light on how our species has understood our role on our planet as owners, custodians, or exploiters of the natural world, and it includes ambiguous friendships.
Otto von Bismarck, Prussian Minister and Chancellor of Germany in the nineteenth century, had many dogs by the names of Flora, Sultan, Tyras, and Rebekka, who gained international fame during their owner’s lifetime.
His pets functioned as part of the extended familia of the Bismarck’s household. During early mornings, Otto went for walks before breakfast accompanied by his hounds, and his dogs attended houshold meals as a rule. Indoors, they were free to roam about and “rampag[e].” Otto had the habits of feeding his dogs at the table, giving them six sausages for their dinner in front of the guests on 11th April 1879. This made the Tiras and Rebekkas of the Bismarck household well-known among their circle of friends, acquaintances and colleagues. In the 1880s, when Bismarck became despondent, he only wanted to spend time with his pets, wanting no human company. These dogs clearly meant a lot to Otto von Bismarck, yet, attitudes towards animals at the time were ambiguous at best, and Otto not immune to the general acceptance of violence towards them.
At some points, Bismarck’s treatment of his pets aimed to merely avert danger to humans. One of the Tirsases on 13th June 1878 jumped upon the foreign emissary Gortschakow during a visit. When the diplomat visited again in May of 1881, his dog Tiras was tied away to prevent a repetition of the international debacle. The dogs seemed to display something of a vicious attitude towards guests, leading historian Otto Pflanze to call the animal “particularly savage,” noting that even household members feared the creature. As these dogs also served as hunting aids, such behavior should not entirely surprise us.
Yet, at other times, Bismarck’s treatment of his dogs was beyond any measure of the reasonable. When Rebekka displayed behavior Bismarck called wanting in “domesticity” in 1845, he chained her up for several days on end [‘tagelang’]. Several anecdotes recollect the dogs attacking or threatening smaller dogs or even members of the Bismarck family, such as Otto’s daughter’s lap dog and his wife Johanna when dancing with Otto, eliciting growls from the boar hound. In response to the attack on the smaller pet, Bismarck “lashed the animal with a riding whip until he could no longer lift his arm.” Contemporaries noted that Bismarck punished his dogs severely.
The most extreme example of Bismarck’s violence against his hounds is the case of Sultan’s death in 1877. Christoph von Tiedemann, a colleague, recollects: “during coffee it was suddenly discovered that Sultan, the big boarhound, who had just been spoiled by everyone at table, had disappeared. As Sultan had a love-affair in a nearby town” the party presumed him there, as on previous occasions. When Sultan returned, Bismarck said angrily he would give the dog “a good thrashing” (tüchtig durchprügeln) when he found him. When he returned, the guests were told “Sultan was on his last breaths.” Sultan died, his head on Bismarck’s lap, “tears” in the Prince’s eyes, “whispering soothing words in the dog’s ear,” leaving Bismarck to regret having “punished him” so harshly. The results were insomnia and guilt pangs. Sultan was buried on the 26th October 1877 “at a beautiful area in the park.” Bismarck mourned the hound quoting Shakespeare, avoided conversation, and raged against himself in the following days, blaming himself for the death of the dog, for “having beat him,” calling himself “raging, brutal, and causing everyone pain, who met him” before also regretting mourning the death of an animal for so long.” For Bismarck to rage so strongly against himself suggests that the beating of the animal must have at least been so violent, as to make such a causal connection plausible. Onlookers asserted, the Prince had “lost a friend and [felt] lonely.”
One might presume, Bismarck eased in his treatment of Sultan’s successor after this event, but no. When Sultan’s successor Tiras, a dog of the same breed, ripped a maid’s dress, Bismarck beat this dog as well.
Bismarck channeled contemporary Prussian, masculine, militaristic attitudes towards animals, as much as he questioned them, giving him an ambiguous, partly deeply attached, partly abusive attitude towards his pets paired with self-loathing. Bismarck was used to shooting animals, killing a seal during a trip to the Northern Sea islands while hunting for but not finding any dolphins to slay. It was only after having completed such deeds that regret hit the constant hunter. Regarding his dead sea-hound, Bismarck wrote, that he was sorry to have shot it, because it had “such a good-natured doglike face and great beautiful eyes, that I was decently sorry.” Yet, at the same time, the compassion for the dead mammal lay closer to the values of anti-vivisection activists active in this era.
Further, when the Kaiser gave him a “dreadful black dog…a caricature of a dog, with a huge head, drooping eyes, scantily thin, small chested, without breed, pitiful to look on” Bismarck considered poisoning him, but told his family friends: “yet, he likes me so very much, has such good loyal eyes—therefore, I cannot make the decision to do it.” His family friend Spitzemberg found this “sentimental love to animals” both charming and odd in equal measure.
On more than one occasion Bismarck expressed the hope to meet his many dogs in the afterlife. When visiting the Bismarcks, Spitzemberg heard Johanna, Otto’s wife, say about dear Flora’s death, that she hoped to meet her pet in a next realm. Bismarck replied “And why shouldn’t that be? …I certainly hope to meet dogs and horses in heaven.” Similarly, a friend recollected him saying “Those old German forefathers of ours had a kind religion. They believed that, after death, they would again meet in the celestial hunting-grounds all the good dogs that had been their faithful companions in life. I wish I could believe that.” Bismarck repeatedly acknowledged how undignified his own grief was when his pets died—especially after Sultan’s death in 1877—aware of how insensible this sounded to conservative aristocratic ears. And yet, treasuring his pets emotionally places Otto von Bismarck into the long line of paradoxical central European lovers of nature and skeptics of humans—all the way to Hitler and his well-known German Shepard Blondie.
Sky Michael Johnston:
For our final three stories we are traveling to the Americas. This group starts with a story from me about colonial North America. That will be, “Narragansett Friendship, Roger Williams, and Religious Freedom in America.” Next, Dr. Silvia Marina Arrom shares a fascinating story from the history of Mexico. Her story is called, “The Friendship that Introduced a Heroine of Mexican Independence to the World.” And, finally, we’ll wrap things up with my story about the United States government entitled, “On the Doors of the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Sky Michael Johnston:
Historians point to the year 1648 as a watershed moment in the development of religious tolerance in Europe. In that year, the Peace of Westphalia brought an end to the Thirty Year’s War—one of Europe’s grimmest chapters of religiously-inflected violence. The agreement granted Europeans unprecedented levels of religious freedom.
At the same time that Europe was on its circuitous, and bloody, path towards religious freedom in first half of the seventeenth century, across the Atlantic, the road to religious tolerance was similarly fraught with detours. British colonialists in North America tried to preserve religiously exclusive communities, even by the means of persecuting dissenters. Roger Williams was a Puritan minister from England who found himself on the wrong end of persecutorial zeal in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635. When tensions formed between Williams and his fellow Puritans and when he spoke out against the punishment of religious dissent and against the confiscation of Native American land, Williams was banished from the colony himself.
At this time, Williams was saved by the friendship that had been extended to him by the local Narragansett population, the aboriginal people of the region. Among the Narragansett, Williams experienced tolerance and freedom that was not offered in Massachusetts. And with Narragansett support, Williams founded Providence and then Rhode Island as places of religious freedom in the American colonies which soon attracted persecuted individuals and communities from many different locations.
In a tragic irony, Narragansett Indians were only to enjoy the freedom they helped establish for a short while. Even during Roger Williams’ own lifetime, steady incursion by settlers precipitated King Philip’s War and the Great Swamp Massacre which killed many Narragansett. Survivors were sold into slavery or fled to places as far away as New York and Wisconsin.
When the United States was founded roughly a century later, the principle of religious freedom was enshrined in its founding documents. But that end was not all a guaranteed outcome of colonial practices and governance. Narragansett friendship created the conditions for a successful colonial experiment with religious tolerance even before the Peace of Westphalia was reached in Europe. The spark of religious freedom secured in Rhode Island went on to become a defining value of the United States. The Narragansett people played a vital role in that process.
Silvia Marina Arrom:
I want to tell you about the friendship between two women, nearly two centuries ago, that’s had a very long tail in Mexican history. On February first, 1840, shortly after arriving in Mexico City, Fanny Calderón de la Barca – the Scottish wife of the new Spanish ambassador – met doña María Ignacia Rodríguez de Velasco, an aging socialite who was known by her nickname, La Güera, because she was very fair. So impressed was Fanny, that that very night, she wrote to a relative about her new acquaintance; and that letter was later published as part of Fanny’s marvelous travel account, Life in Mexico. The two women became fast friends, sharing lively visits, traveling with their husbands to nearby towns to celebrate religious fiestas, and passing the time with La Güera’s spicy gossip and entertaining stories. Because she was apparently quite a character. Fanny left after two years, and La Güera died a few years later.
But Fanny’s descriptions of her dear friend gave her a second life, because Life in Mexico was instrumental in La Güera’s journey from history to myth. In particular that letter of their first meeting where La Güera recounted that, when Alexander von Humboldt visited Mexico nearly forty years earlier, he had pronounced her the most beautiful woman he had met in all his travels. And she claimed to have taken him to see cochineal production on a nopal plantation, and that afterwards they were constantly together, with the great scientist captivated more by her wit than her beauty. But then Fanny added a twist that came from her own imagination: that “the grave traveler was considerably under the influence of her fascinations” and indulged in a “slight stratum of flirtation.” “So I have caught him,” she wrote, and “it is a comfort to think that ‘sometimes even the great Humboldt nods.’” Of course, La Güera had only portrayed their friendship as one of companionship and shared intellectual curiosity.
But it was Fanny’s titillating addition that captured the attention of generations of readers and served as the starting point for the myth of the irresistibly seductive Güera. Fanny’s letter has been reproduced and cited endlessly by authors who spun increasingly fantastic tales about the charming lady who supposedly had affairs not only with Humboldt, but with Simón Bolívar and the Mexican liberator Agustín de Iturbide. And as her alleged political influence grew along with her glamour, it came to be said that she was the Mother of Mexico, who gave Iturbide the compromise plan that led to independence in 1821.
In this year, when Mexico commemorates its bicentennial, La Güera is celebrated as one of a handful of independence heroines, as well as a feminist before her time who was (supposedly) as sexually liberated as she was wise. All myths that began with those few sentences written by her dear friend, Fanny Calderón de la Barca, a friendship that lives on in popular memory.
Sky Michael Johnston:
During a recent visit to Washington D.C. with my family, we visited the United States’ Supreme Court Building. It was a quiet Monday afternoon without a cloud in the sky and only an occasional fellow tourist passing by. As the setting sun made its way towards the Capitol Rotunda behind us, the white marble of the Supreme Court Building was so bright we had to squint.
The building, completed in 1935, was obviously intended to inspire awe of the court that it houses. Above a mountainous stairway, sixteen towering Corinthian columns in two rows of eight support an ornate entablature prominently displaying the phrase: EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.
Behind the columns you can find two doors that look much larger when you are standing in front of them than they do in pictures with only the massive columns for scale. In fact, the doors are seventeen feet tall and nine-and-a-half feet wide. Made of bronze, they weigh around 13 tons.
Each door comprises four square bas-reliefs stacked upon each other. Within each of the eight squares are scenes featuring two figures representing important developments in the history of law in the Western tradition.
The doors were designed by Cass Gilbert, the architect of the Supreme Court Building and John Donnelly, Sr. Donnelly and his son, John Donnelly, Jr. were a father-son team in which Donnelly, Jr. served as the sculptor.
The eight scenes on the door situate America within a linear narrative of the Western world—a narrative that runs from Ancient Greece to Washington D.C. itself. The Neoclassical style of numerous buildings in Washington, including the Supreme Court Building, vividly portray this imagining of history. The door tells this story quite explicitly. The first scene features an episode from Homer’s Illiad, the second, third, and fourth scenes move chronologically through the Roman Empire. Of the four scenes on the second door three scenes depict episodes from English history: the Magna Carta and the Westminster Statute of the thirteenth century and Sir Edward Coke barring King James I from the high court—separating the executive and judicial branches of English government in early seventeenth century.
The eighth, and culminating, scene on the doors shows early nineteenth-century U.S. Supreme Court Justices John Marshall and Joseph Story.
As enshrined on the door of the U.S. Supreme Court Building in bronze, John Marshall and Joseph Story were friends. But what was it that earned this pair of friends the most prominent place on these monumental seventeen-foot doors? It was this: their association with the 1803 Supreme Court case Marbury v. Madison. That was the case that established the principle of judicial review, giving the federal courts power to declare legislative and executive acts unconstitutional. In other words, it set the judicial branch of the United States Government on equal footing with the legislative and executive branches.
John Marshall was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1803 and wrote the unanimous opinion in Marbury v. Madison. He was appointed as Chief Justice by President John Adams and served in that role from 1801 to 1835. Marshall is still the longest-serving Chief Justice in the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Donnellys, the father and son who built the doors, described the scene as a depiction of Chief Justice Marshal and Joseph Story discussing Marbury v. Madison in front of the U.S. Capitol. That depiction isn’t precisely accurate, however, because Joseph Story did not actually join the Supreme Court until 1812. Story served as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court until 1845 and was Marshall’s staunchest ally in the court. From 1812 to 1835, while they served together, Marshall and Story solidified the Supreme Court’s important position in the U.S. Government.
Today, if you visit Washington D.C. you can stand in front of those towering doors on the U.S. Supreme Court Building which, as huge as they are, are dwarfed by the even bigger Corinthian Columns in from of them. If you have the same response that I did when I was in that spot, you’ll be impressed by the grandiosity of the building. And that’s how the building was designed to make you feel. It was intended to send the message that the court housed in that building has a place in the U.S. government alongside the legislative bodies—the Congress and the Senate—that are housed in the Capitol Building whose shadow almost reached the steps of the Supreme Court when I was there.
Sky Michael Johnston:
Thank you for listening and thank you to all of our storytellers from Season 9. I am excited to announce that Season 10 will begin on Monday, one week from today, and that the theme for Season 10 is “Seeking Justice.” Please come back next week for our first story on that important theme. Until then, so long.