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Eschede in the Suedheide Nature Park 
The village Eschede near Celle in the "Suedheide Nature Park"
Eschede is a municipality in the district of Celle ( Celle Castle was the former residence of the Kings of England & Dukes of Hannover) , in Lower Saxony, Germany. Situated 16 km northeast of Celle, Eschede lies at the border of the "Südheide Nature Park", a protected area of large forests and heaths, today a preferred holiday resort.
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Flohrmühle at Eschede, a restored windmill from 1874 housing changing exhibitions and the wedding room of the registry office, St. John’s Church in Eschede, a simple structure with a wooden tower typical for the South Heath, rural idyll around the Aschau and Lohe Lakes, the Lutter Nature Project with national importance, typical South Heath villages such as Marwede, Endeholz, Rebberlah and Starkshorn. |
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20 small villages are part of the "Samtgemeinde Eschede" with its nearly 6300 inhabitants. In 1975, a large fire destroyed vast tracts of forests in the area.
The painter Albert Koenig (1881-1944) was born in Eschede, the "Albert-Koenig-Museum" can be visited in Unterlüß : www.albertkoenigmuseum.de
Geographical data for Eschede: www.fallingrain.com/world/GM/06/Eschede.html
The author Arno Schmidt in Bargfeld near Eschede
Bargfeld near Eschede was since 1958 the home of the german author Arno Schmidt.
In 1945, Arno Schmidt volunteered for duty at the front in Northern Germany in order to be granted a home visit. He used that visit to organize a defection from Lusatia westwards for him and his wife, in order to evade capture by the Red Army, which was famed for its abuse of prisoners of war, and gave himself up to British forces in Lower Saxony.
After an interlude as an English POW and later as an interpreter at a police school, Schmidt started his future life as a freelance writer during the time of wandering that followed the war. Arno Schmidt became part of the throng of refugees moved by the authorities from village to village in West Germany.
In Kastel, he was accused in court of blasphemy and moral subversion, which was then still prosecuted in the Catholic parts of West Germany. As a result, Schmidt and his wife moved to the Protestant city of Darmstadt in Hesse, where the suit against him was dismissed.
In 1958, the Schmidts moved to the small village of Bargfeld ( nearEschede & Celle ) in Lower Saxony, where they were to stay .
Arno Schmidt was a strict individualist, almost a solipsist. Disaffected by his experience of the Third Reich, he had an extremely pessimistic world view. In "Schwarze Spiegel" , he describes his utopia as an empty world after an anthropogenic apocalypse. Although he was a strict atheist, he maintained that the world was created by a monster called Leviathan, whose predatory nature was passed on to humans. Still, he thought this monster could not be too powerful to be attacked, if it behooved humanity.
His writing style is characterized by a unique and witty style of adapting colloquial language, which won him quite a few fervent admirers. Moreover, he developed an orthography by which he thought to reveal the true meaning of words and their connections amongst each other. The atoms of words holding the nuclei of original meaning he called Etyme (etyms).
His theory of etyms is developed in his magnum opus, "Zettels Traum" , in which an elderly writer comments on Edgar Allan Poe's works in a stream of consciousness, while discussing a Poe translation with a couple of translators . Schmidt also accomplished a translation of Edgar Allan Poe's works himself.
In the 1960s, he authored a series of plays for German radio stations presenting forgotten or little known and - in his opinion - vastly underrated authors, as e.g. Johann Gottfried Schnabel, Karl Philipp Moritz, Leopold Schefer, Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow, et al..
As none of his works sold more than a few thousand copies, he lived in extreme poverty. During the last few years of his life, Arno Schmidt was financially supported by the philologist Jan Philipp Reemtsma.
After a stroke, Arno Schmidt died in a hospital at Celle in June 1979. The Arno Schmidt Foundation (Arno Schmidt Stiftung) in Bargfeld, dotated by Jan Philipp Reemtsma, is publishing his complete works.
www.arno-schmidt-stiftung.de
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www.eschede.de www.albertkoenigmuseum.de www.celle.de
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