Read in 2023 - 25, 27

To speed things up a bit (I still have a back log of several book reviews to type up and post), here is another post combining two reviews in one - this time, both of them works of non-fiction.

#25: Die Schwabenkinder

by Christine Brugger and others

One of the remarkable things about our hotel in Bizau was that there were shelves of books in the dining room, the halls you walked through on the way to your room, the lounge and so on. They were in no particular order and ranged from anything like the tiniest poetry collection to popular novels, local recipes and coffee table books about modern architecture.

One morning I spotted this book on the shelf next to where we were having breakfast. Only the day before we had been talking about the subject during the goatherds' walk.

For centuries, the children of poor families in the rough mountain areas of Austria, Switzerland and parts of what today is Italy (Southern Tyrol) were sent away from home from early spring to late autumn to work for farmers in the more affluent Swabia (Schwaben). Some of the children were only six years old (sometimes even younger), the oldest were about fourteen.

They worked for very little money, but the survival of their families depended even on what little they would bring home. The work was not only physically hard, they were also often in near total social isolation, not seeing any other children for weeks or months on end, as they were out with the cows or goats all the time. School was not even considered.

Some were lucky and ended up in families that were kind to them, fed them well and gave them proper clothes; others suffered terrible abuse.

Homesickness was common to all of them, but they still returned year after year until they were old enough to take up "proper" jobs for adults and were not under the rule of their families anymore (and would have been too expensive anyway for the farmers who had exploited them during their childhood and youth).

Of very few Schwabenkinder ("Swabian children", named so because they migrated to Swabia regularly) it is known that they found new homes in their work place, married and had families of their own.

There are numerous books and films about them, both documentaries and novels based on real-life reports. This one approaches the subject on various levels and made for very good, although sometimes really hard, and instructive reading.

The entire subject was very much on my mind for weeks, and I supplemented my reading with some internet research.

You can find out more about the Schwabenkinder on wikipedia.

# 27: Madly, Deeply - The Alan Rickman Diaries

Edited by Alan Taylor

This was a surprise gift from my sister, and a great one at that!

As a Harry Potter fan, I have always liked Alan Rickman in the role of Professor Severus Snape but was hardly aware of him in other films, although I knew there was so much more to him than "just" Snape, and acting was just one aspect of his work.

Of course you all know that his most distinctive feature was his voice; not only his voice as such, but his entire way of speaking. 

The diaries posthumously published are his real diaries, edited by a journalist and writer, with a foreword by Emma Thompson, a close friend of Alan Rickman's.

Although he started to keep diary about 20 years earlier, the first entry in this book is from June 13, 1993. The last one is from December 12, 2015. He died a few weeks later, on 14 January 2016, at the age of 69.

His diary covers not only his everyday appointments, meetings, his work as an actor and director. There is also a LOT of travelling, and he talks of his friends as well as politics quite a lot, too.

Some pages show what his diaries really looked like, with beautiful handwriting and even more beautiful illustrations. A multi-talented and multi-faceted personality emerges from the pages, but I must admit I did not always understand everything - some of his entries are "coded" (he admits to that himself in one of the entries where he wonders whether he'll still be able to understand his own code when looking through old entries years after he wrote them), and there are tons of footnotes by the editor, explaining who is meant when Rickman only provides initials or nicknames, etc.

There is an appendix about the earlier diaries, a brief chronology of his life's most crucial events (very useful), and a rather touching last part by his wife Rima Horton, describing her husband's last weeks.

I can highly recommend this book, no matter whether you know and/or like the Harry Potter movies or not (they do not feature all that prominently, really). Thank you, sister, for another great addition to my personal library!