Borges and Weidenau

March 21, 2019 by joachim

I was for the first time in Buenos Aires, home of Borges and his world of infinite mirrors. Reading a book on Borges on the plane, I discovered that among all his invented characters he may have picked from the world map, there is a Julia von Weidenau. Weidenau/Sieg (later gobbled up and denigrated to a mere suburb by the larger town of Siegen) is my home town. Weidenau has never been the seat of a feudal lord, so the construct of a Julia von Weidenau is quite fantastic, and in keeping with Borges’ habitual transcendance of reality. Quite the contrary, Weidenau was the proud home of Friedrich Flender, a blacksmith who defied the feudal lords of Nassau/Orania in refusing to pay newly imposed taxes. He was imprisoned, and finally executed. From then on, his name lived on as one of the local freedom fighters. The elementary school I attended was named after him just a few years after I left it for high school.

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3 Responses to Borges and Weidenau

  1. Pablo says:
    June 20, 2019 at 11:10 am

    The world is like this… Read your story in the Latinoamerica edition of ElPais newspaper today (https://t.co/vb2gyN7wyu). There someone said that you have a blog so I come here. And the first thing i read was that you read some of Borges….
    Congrats for the Nobel by the way, I know your writing will be published from time to time.

    But the world is like this, today smaller as it seems. You have a new reader, of your blog at least.

    Best Regards!

    Reply
    1. Joachim Frank says:
      August 21, 2020 at 12:57 am

      Hi Pablo:

      thanks for your comment! I just want to tell you that one of my novels has been published now. Look it up: AAN ZEE, available as e-book on 24 intl.platforms incl. kindel.

      –Joachim

      Reply
    2. joachim says:
      October 11, 2021 at 6:05 pm

      Hi Pablo,
      I’m going through the comment history and found yours again. Thanks! Go to franxfiction and look up AAN ZEE. It was published in Oct 2019 but the publisher did a bad job with publicity and distribution. But now they published another edition in Europe with a lot of publicity, look at multiple distribution links. Let me know if you like the book. best, Joachim

      Reply

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