The mural on this building in Mannheim is called “Nations in Peace – Colourful Cultures”. It has been designed with students from two schools under the guidance of the artist Bahaiden.
Peace
This painted pebble has the same message – albeit on a much smaller scale.
“If you are a narcissist loving yourself you have at least the advantage of not having many rivals in your love.”
One of the many very witty and occasionally sharp aphorisms of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, a physicist and satirist who was one of the foremost European thinkers of the 18th century.
This wall stands in the middle of a little square, next to the Lichtenbergstraße in Darmstadt. I don’t know if it was purposely designed to invite others to add their thoughts or if sprayers just gravitate naturally to it. The slogans are mainly political (if crude) and their topicality suggest that the wall is at least occasionally scrubbed. I have no idea where the stag beetle comes in.
Thanks to Anita from RDP I learned a new word today: crepidate. Since it is a word describing a sound it is not surprising that I did not immediately have a photo at hand to respond. I am grateful for Anita’s explanation but I had to look the word up in other sources, switching from English to German and found that the German variant is mainly used in a medical context, i.e. the sound bones make after a break when the two surfaces rub against each other (ouch!!!). Then I found this on the English wikipedia site:
“Crepitation refers to situations where noises are produced by the rubbing of parts one against the other, as in:
Crepitus, a crunching sensation felt in certain medical problems
Rales or crackles, abnormal sounds heard over the lungs with a stethoscope
A mechanism of sound production in grasshoppers during flight. Also called “wing snapping”.”
Grashoppers! That’s the route I wanted to take and although I was sure that I had a grashopper in my archive somewhere I couldn’t find one. Bummer.
So I went with the second definition: “Rales or crackles, abnormal sounds heard over the lungs with a stethoscope”.
Stethoscope I can do. This particular doctor might hear the crepitation in his own lungs, the way he carries it.
This painted house, called the Hornbacher Steinhäusel, features children and dwarves and little animals searching for and then greeting St. Nicolas. The dwarves (or possibly gnomes or brownies) carry lanterns for the children to find their way in the dark woods.
In 1812, Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe met through Empress Marie Ludovika of Austria-Este in Teplice. This mural commemorates this meeting – and no, I do not know who the men to the left of Beethoven and Goethe are.