Author Patti Smith, who nearly five decades ago was synonymous with punk rock, New York City’s CBGBs and the last gasp of the Greenwich Village “Bohemian scene” of 1947-1972, filed the following blog on “Our Troubled World, A Small Journey, A Humble Table” from Berlin today, in the course of a concert tour she is presently on in Germany.
“So, I’m certain, that, as all of us, all of you, I’m, we are all sickened by the state of our world, by the threat of new wars and environmental disasters, and human rights violations, and stampeding crime and corruption. But I can’t even speak of that. And so what do we do? For me, I’m just doing my work, tending to the needs of my family, and taking care of my responsibilities, which, this is one of them. And I really can’t talk about all of the things that are happening because they’re much too complex and complicated. We really have to step back and look at our world with global and humanistic sensibilities. So, I continue on with my work.
“Yesterday, my friends drove me, instead of getting a train, we drove from Weimar, which I like very much, really the home of Goethe and Schiller, and they did so much great work there. They built a theater. They created a renaissance in German theater. There are so many things you could talk about in terms of Goethe and Schiller. But I’m only speaking of Schiller’s country house in Jena. It’s connected with the University of Jena, which he worked at for a few years. Unfortunately, Schiller with such a beautiful mind, like so many of our great poets, and mathematicians, and artists, and just soldiers, human beings that were stricken in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century with consumption, with tuberculosis. And he died in his—I think he was around 47.
