My great grandfather was the vice rector of the university at the time, as an historian he took the initiative to covertly collect evidence of all the nazi crimes, evidence which was used in the nuremberg trials.
But more interestingly, there was a nationalist movement in Belgium at the the time, and a debate on which language to use at the university. The international language (french) or the local language (flemish). He was of the opinion that both had their place, which put him in opposition to the nationalists. Since he was one of the founders of the flemish literature movement, and the prime expert on flemish history he was hard to attack directly by the nationalists. So they denounced him to the gestapo, hoping they would get rid of him while keeping their hands clean. Fortunately for me it didn’t work, as the nazis were also reliant on his academic work for their pan-germanic narrative and refused to attack him directly as well.
Nowadays we see as well western nationalist movements with ambivalent support for murderous regimes such as Russia, and I think this support comes in no small part from the idea that those regimes can be used to do the dirty work that they are too cowardly to do themselves
To do — how? by invading their countries and establishing a police state? That’s a little too much even for so called “nationalists”. I think it’s just plain old bribery and propaganda.
As a Russian who emigrated a long time ago for political reasons, signed countless anti-Kremlin petitions, and sent money to support Ukraine and her people, I am scared how many people support this regime for reasons unknown. I don’t know any other possible reason except selling one’s soul for money.
Look up tankies[0] —- people who support these atrocities by imperialists and other problematic regimes because they’re so conditioned against the US / Western nations that they assume anyone acting against the west’s interests must be doing good.
I am aware of the phenomenon; the interesting part is the word “conditioned”. By whom? And, eventually, who paid for the conditioning? (I think it mostly ends with the usual suspects, Russia, China and Iran).
Possibly at least somewhat. I think it also comes from getting disillusioned by legitimately terrible things done by the US in the name of “democracy” e.g. Latin American death squads in the 70s/80s, Iraq war and war on terror, etc.
People can’t seem to hold the idea of multiple countries being problematic and doing objectionable things. Certainly information ops from your usual suspects feed into this.
Conditioning doesn't need to be something one does to another. You can condition yourself by just dabbling in something and then going down the rabbit hole.
The flemish nationalists supported the nazis long before they invaded. I don’t think Russia will invade the USA any time soon, but it can invade other countries and throw liberals out of windows over there, normalizing the practice and diminishing the power of liberalism worldwide
> The flemish nationalists supported the nazis long before they invaded.
s/The/Some/
Leuven. It's a Dutch speaking town. The university is KU Leuven. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KU_Leuven
Yes, it is, but you can't rewrite history.
It was internationaly called Louvain before the international recognition for Leuven only camed after the events of 1968.
That's why the “Louvain shall be our battle cry” became a popular march in Britain. [1]
And why it was called so in Australia. [2].
I guess that's why most of the English articles about Leuven includes the French name.
1. https://theo.kuleuven.be/apps/press/ecsi/belgian-culture-and... 2. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/15533652.
It is now. Belgian history is the true definition of insanity. There were Belgians who were quite happy to see this university go up in flames.
> Louvain (“Leuven”)
The correct name of the city is Leuven: it is a Flemish city, not a Wallonian one. Using French names for Flemish cities is just wrong.
Total aside: I have been playing Crusader Kings repeatedly using Leuven as the home city for my character's dynasty. I don't know why I zeroed in on the city, but I have done over 30 run-throughs so far. (Yes, that is a little obsessive.)
First starting as Count of Leuven, then building up to become Duke of Brabant, then King of Lotharingia, then the Holy Roman Emperor.
Now, having this historical context, I want to visit.
These are called exonyms and there's nothing wrong with them. The Italian city of Firenze is anglicized as Florence. The anglicized Jesus Christ is latinized as Iesus Christus, hellenized as Iesous Christos, aramaicized as Yeshua Mshiha. People do this all the time with tons of words and especially with proper nouns. It's completely normal and okay.
I love exonyms when they are native. As you note, the English name for the Italian city is Florence (so too the proper English words are Turkey, Kiev and Peking, not Turkiye, Kyiv or Beijing).
I see no reason at all to use the French name for a Flemish city when writing in English. When writing in French, sure.
But Florence is the French name of that city. Or Rome. I don't really understand the difference with Louvain.
It's normal, but it causes some problems: people using the wrong exonym or failing to find something they're looking for. And it seems to be gradually going out of fashion.
Which places in Belgium have an English Wikipedia page with an exonym as the page title? I can find Brussels, Bruges, Ghent, Ostend. Are there others?
I wouldn't be very surprised if a couple of those went out of fashion in English over the coming decades, just like "Brunswick", "Francfort" and "Aix-la-Chapelle" went out of fashion. And "Basle" is on the way out, isn't it?
A bit off topic, but you had me curious: the first exonym that I could think about was Quebec City, which is called in French Ville de Québec. The interesting part though is that the official name of the city in both languages is Québec, lacking the Ville or the City. Is this an exonym though, since its Canadians who have come up with both? Probably depends on who you speak to.
They are wrong. This is like calling Gdansk, Danzig.
You mean like calling the Netherlands, Holandia?
There's a lot of exonyms in Polish in everyday use.
The library was rebuilt with American aid. If you walk around the building today you will see all the plaques of contributing institutions embedded in the walls.
In August of 1914, during World War I, Leuven was looted by German troops. In the night of the 25th to 26th of August, they set fire to a large part of the city, effectively destroying about half of it. The Germans set fire to the 14th century University Hall and its library wing. The University library burned, and with it about 300,000 books, about 1000 incunabula and a huge collection of manuscripts, including the University’s founding bull from 1425.
The Germans had aimed to punish Leuven after alleging the presence of snipers in the city. They claimed that the sacking of Leuven was a fair reprisal. Their ‘punisment’ of Leuven destroyed more than 1000 buildings and cost more than 200 lives.
When war broke out in Europe in September 1939, soon after the restoration of Leuven’s new library, Belgium found itself neutral once again.
After the retreat of the British and with German forces entering the city, on the 17th of May 1940 the new University library was set aflame after an artillery barrage. Molten glass from the above floors flowed into the cellars, past the steel doors, and destroyed the collections. The entire building was gutted. Not even twelve years after its opening, the new University library was reduced to rubble and its collections were ravaged once more. The occupying forces accused the British of having set the library ablaze on purpose to allow them to later blame the Germans. No access to the ruin or objective investigations were allowed. Joseph Goebbels, German propaganda minister, paid the ruined library a visit to push the German version of events. At the Nuremberg tribunal it was found that the library burned after German artillery had struck it. Only 21,000 of the original 900,000 pieces in the library collection were left. Hundreds of manuscripts (including some that had survived the 1914 fire) and everything from before 1501 was destroyed.
https://ghum.kuleuven.be/ggs/research/america-europefund/aef...
Now we need an article about KULouvian splitting with UCLouvain and building a new town and university from scratch in less than 3 years, a true engineering marvel.
Related that library was split into 2 because of this: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/when-was-the-leuven-li...
You also need to learn that the Flemish wanted so much to get rid of the French only classes that in 1916 they created a Dutch speaking university... with the help of the German that destroyed Leuven the year before.
On the flipside. American universities supported a rebuild of the library and today still it is one of the most magnificent libraries you will see anywhere in the world.
It’s really jarring reading about a place I know and having it’s name inexplicably changed to French. Why?
It seems like a lot of primary sources for this article used the French name. Even if it was incorrect, maybe that was how it was commonly referred to outside of Belgium at the time?
- https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1502002700
- https://www.hi.uni-stuttgart.de/wgt/ww-one/Start/Weissbluten...
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25122278.pdf?acceptTC=true
Belgium was in an odd state of bilingualism at the time. While the people of the area would speak Flemish (“Dutch”), those in positions of power and education institutions would use French as the Lingua Franca.
I was born in Leuven and lived there for 30 years of my life - it would be pretty odd to see contemporary references as “Louvain” by those local to it.
Very interesting to note that Oxford wasn't extensively bombed in ww2 despite being a manufacturing hub. I wonder what role this incident had in that choice.
Take that with a huge grain of salt, but I've read recently that Hitler was thinking of making Oxford Britain's capital if the German invasion would have successfully happened, so because of that he didn't bomb it. I cannot remember the exact sources for that.
On firmer ground when it comes to sources, I'm now reading E. H. Carr's Conditions of Peace [1] (written in 1942, so during WW2) and at some point he was also suggesting moving UK's capital from London further to the North, he was thinking somewhere in Midlands, if I remember right. It turns out that even back then some of the British people were fully aware of London's negative pull caused by its oversize.
The correct name of this city is Leuven.
The situation in 2024 is much more confusing. Because it seems to me that the political side that styles itself to be against the far-right, is also very much in favour of curtailing free speech and reigning in internet platforms where people share news and political opinions. So who is burning the books? Everyone? I'm so confused.
“Where they burn books, they will also burn people” — Heinrich Heine
Final sentence:
To this day, the burning of the library in Louvain remains a battle line, which we should be weary [sic] to ever cross again, for as Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) so eloquently once stated, “where they burn books, they will also burn people”.
The wary/weary mixup is so strange to me, especially because it seems relatively new (last 5-10 years at most).
My wife started using the word this way about 20 years ago, I also heard it on TV ads at the time.
I always assumed it was a confused fusion of "wary" and "leery".
I always assumed it was just a misspelling of "wary" by analogy to "wear". You're telling me that people actually say "weary" when they mean "wary"? That's very different from what I thought.
It’s not that strange?
The words are homophones and both express a reticent emotional state.
Where in the world are you that weary and wary are homophones? Genuinely interested, I can’t think of a dialect where that’s the case.
They are not homophones? I’m not a native speaker and I’ve simply always assumed they are. I lived in London and the US for many years, but these are not common words in speech so I never got corrected.
I guess that must mean “wear” and “weary” have a different pronunciation for “ea”.
This vowel digraph remains my eternal nemesis… Ever since I learned as a child that “bear” doesn’t rhyme with “fear” and found myself faced with the overwhelming realization that I will never speak this language 100% correctly, no matter how much effort I put into reading and writing.
As a non-native speaker, 'to be wary' is not really in my vocabulary, while 'to be weary' seems much more common, and both sound pretty close to each other even if there is a difference even with my accent, so I could see myself making the mistake.
It looks similar to than/then, but than/then is much more jarring to me for some reason.
While they do both often express a reticent emotional state, the cause of that state is different: for 'weary', it is exhaustion from past events, while for 'wary', the concern is to avoid undesirable events in the future.
There is arguably some overlap where someone is being wary because they are weary of similar situations turning out badly all too often in the past.
It’s similar to dominant/dominate and should’ve/should of.
People these days…
So there was a book burning? They just burned all the books? What books did they burn?
They just pulled all books out and burned them because they generally disliked knowledge? Seems weird.