166 – Neisse Border, If You Can Get One

After 1945, Germany lost about a quarter of its pre-1933 territory to Poland and the Soviet Union. The German-Polish border was established at the so-called Oder-Neisse Line, after the two rivers that separate both states today.

Although the border is not in dispute, its establishment remains a touchy issue: millions of Germans were driven westward from Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and other regions where their ancestors had lived for centuries. They were replaced by Soviets (in the part of East Prussia that became the Russian enclaved oblast of Kaliningrad) and by Poles who were themselves displaced by the Soviets (as the Soviet-Polish border also moved west). Nobody sympathised with the displaced Germans’ plight at the time, and even now the attitude in most of Europe (and much of Germany) is: Germany started a brutal war of conquest and lost it; it’s only natural they should be punished for it, by losing territory.

And yet, Germany post-1945 could have been a bit bigger than it actually is nowadays. In March 2007, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) published an article, detailing Stalin’s plans for the post-war eastern German border. It was accompanied by a map from summer 1944, recently found in the Russian State Archives. The Soviet dictator himself drew the proposed boundaries between Germany and Poland. According to this map, the whole of Lower Silesia (Niederschlesien in German) would have remained German, and the city of Breslau (presently Wroclaw in Poland) would have become a divided (or jointly administered) German-Polish city.

Bizarrely, this proposed border would also have been an Oder-Neisse-line: in this map, Lower Silesia is separated from Poland by the Glatzer Neisse, while the present-day border is composed of the Lausitzer (or Görlitzer) Neisse, 200 km to the west. In the FAZ, Polish historian Bogdan Musial gave some background to the shifting to the west (“westverschiebung”) of the German-Polish border.

At the Conference of Tehran at the end of 1943, Roosevelt (US), Churchill (UK) and Stalin (USSR) agreed in principle on moving the Polish-German border (and dividing Germany itself in a western and an eastern zone of influence). A border on the Neisse was agreed upon, without specifying whether this would be the western or eastern of both rivers.

Only at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 did Stalin insist on the western of both eponymous rivers – in part to compensate Poland for his insistance to include the ancient Polish city of Lwow in the Soviet Union. The western powers were adamant in their opposition to the western Neisse plan.

But in the summer of 1945, at the Potsdam Conference, Stalin pushed through his modified proposal. This push westward, hard to swallow for many Germans (and indeed not recognised by West Germany until 1970), gave Stalin additional leverage over Poland, the untouchability of its new, controversial western borders his army could be counted on to guarantee.

The new border also had a practical advantage: it was the shortest, and therefore easiest to defend border between Germany and Poland, only 472 km long. Finally, it should be noted that the present border is not the westernmost of all proposed borders: one plan called for the inclusion in Poland of areas west of the Lausitzer Neisse, i.c. the region around Cottbus and Bautzen, home of the Sorbs, a Slavic minority in Germany.

165 – Licking Europe: Asia As A Horse

Heinrich Bunting’s Itinerarium Sacra Scripturae (‘Travels According to the Scriptures’), first published in 1581, contained accurate maps of the Holy Land, but also three maps of pure fantasy. Two of those have already been described on this site: the world in the form of a cloverleaf (entry #87) and Europe as a queen (entry #141). This is the third one.

The title of this map is Asia Secunda Pars Terrae in Forma Pegasir (‘Asia, the Second Part of the Earth, in the Form of Pegasus‘). The winged horse of Greek mythology is the son of Poseidon and Medusa, was tamed by Athena and became the horse of the Muses. This obviously pagan origin of the image makes its appearance in a Holy Land travel book a bit of a mystery.

On this map, Pegasus is drawn realistically – i.e. Asia is adjusted to horse-shape.
• Asia’s front legs, touching Africa with the knees, constitute Arabia.
• Its head, licking Europe, is Asia Minor (present-day Turkey).
• The Tigris and Euphrates rivers run down its neck, on which is marked the area of Mesopotamia.
• Another river indicated, at the horse’s thigh, is the Ganges, with India Infra Gangem (‘India before the Ganges’) to the west and India Extra Gangem (‘India across the Ganges’).
• The horse’s behind is India Orientalis (‘East India‘, which could be used for parts east of present-day India, e.g. Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies).
• Both hind legs are inscribed with India Meridionalis (‘South India’), which doesn’t at all reflect the single-peninsular nature of the Indian subcontinent.
• The wings are labelled Scythia and Tartaria, names often used to describe the vast unknown areas of Siberia.
• The body of water in between the wings and the horse’s body is the Caspian Sea.

This map found at the Cartographical Curiosities section of the Yale University Library Map Collection.

164 – A Cat’s Map of the Bed

For at least 10.000 years, the animal known to taxonomists as Felis silvestris catus has been among the dearest friends of Homo sapiens sapiens. Their tendency to hunt rats, mice and other vermin earned them the most-favoured pet status.

Contributing to their popularity with early farmers is the fact that cats are strict meat-eaters, passing over the precious harvest of grain and other vegetables. Cats are known to hunt over 1.000 different animal species for food. The Egyptians venerated the mythical cat Bast as goddess of the home and protector of the fields and home from vermin.

Nowadays, for many people, cats are even more familiar than gods: they’re full members of the household. Through thousands of years of domestication, cats have grown accustomed to people, and demonstrate certain pseudo-human traits. They’re pretty fussy eaters, for starters, sometimes starving themselves rather than eating food they don’t like. And they can appear rather lazy, sleeping on average 13 to 14 hours a day – sometimes even up to 20 hours. Not really a ‘cat nap’, is it?

Anybody who’s ever had a cat can testify to the fact that cats, while at times very friendly, cuddly and agreeable to people, in essence are solitary animals with an agenda of their own. To some exasperated owners, returning home after a hard day’s work to find the cat still curled up in the same place as when they left for the office, the question may arise: who is who’s pet? That’s sort of the attitude expressed in this cartoon map, which shows what cats really make of the bed of their ‘owners’. The map came from here.

To conclude this ‘Cat’s Map of the Bed’, here are 10 things you didn’t know about cats (unless you’re a cat fancier):
1. Cats don’t have a clavicle bone, allowing them to pass through any space no bigger than their head.
2. Cats move both legs on one side, and then both leg on the other, a trait they share with camels, giraffes and a select few other mammals. Nobody knows what the connection is, if any.
3. Typically, cat’s claws are sharper on the forefeet are sharper than on the hind feet.
4. Most cats have five claws on their front paws and four or five on their rear paws, but cats are prone to polydactyly. Famously, the cats hanging around Hemingway’s house in Key West are six-toed.
5. Cat’s night vision is superior to humans, but their day vision is inferior.
6. The official name for cat’s whiskers is vibrissae.
7. Due to an ancient mutation, cats can’t taste sweetness.
8. Blue-eyed cats with white fur have a higher incidence of genetic deafness.
9. Cats expend nearly as much fluid grooming as they do urinating.
10. Cats will almost never meow at other cats; that sound is reserved mostly for communication with humans.

And because you didn’t know this either, here are 10 famous cats from history:
1. Boche: cat found by Anne Frank’s family while hiding in the attic in Amsterdam (name is a derogatory French term for German, comparable with ‘Kraut’). Would always pick (and lose) fights with another cat, aptly named Tommy.
2. CopyCat: the first cloned cat.
3. Kaspar: wooden cat used to round out unlucky parties of 13 at the Savoy Hotel in London.
4. Oscar: hospice cat with uncanny ability to predict which patients will die by curling up with them hours before their death. Recorded in the New England Journal of Medicine in mid-2007, when he had been right 25 times.
5. Sir Isaac Newton’s cat: its incessant desire to be let in and out allegedly drove Newton to invent the cat flap.
6. Siam: a gift from the American consul in Bangkok to US president Rutherford B. Hayes, the first Siamese cat in the US (1878).
7. The Master’s Cat: belonged to Charles Dickens, and would snuff his reading candle to get attention.
8. Muezza: the Prophet Mohammed’s cat. He once cut off the sleeve of his robe when called out to prayer rather than disturb the sleeping cat upon it, or so it’s related.
9. Sizi: Albert Schweitzer’s cat when he lived in Africa; although he was a left-hander, he would write with his right when Sizi slept on his left arm.
10. Taki: black female Persian cat of Raymond Chandler, who considered her his ‘feline secretary’ – he would read out the first drafts of his murder mysteries to her.