Archive for category Travel

My Own Private Soave

Dear readers, I have fallen off the face of the earth in the last eight night months but I have very good reasons for it. We moved to Italy. Then while still staying in a hotel and looking for a place to live, Oxford University Press-USA offered me a book deal. This significantly speeded up the [...]

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The Marmorpalais Mystery

If you happened to read carefully the preface of On War that Marie von Clausewitz wrote in 1832, you would notice that she emphasized the Marmorpalais (or the Marble Palace in English) as her place of work and residence. Of course I wanted to see it, especially since this early classism building, after meticulous renovation, [...]

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The Clausewitz Museum in Burg

    It will cost you only one euro. This is the humble entrance fee for Burger Clausewitz Erinnerungsstätte, as the museum in Clausewitz parents house is called officially in German. I admit that when I left Berlin to visit Burg bei Magdeburg, a town approximately 2 hours west, I had very low expectations for the [...]

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The Town Where Clausewitz Was Born

I went to Burg by Magdeburg to learn more about Carl von Clausewitz’s family and background. When Peter Paret wrote his biography Clausewitz and the State in the 1960s and 1970s, the German Democratic Republic and the Berlin Wall were still very real. So, as a source for his description, Paret mainly used Theodore Fontane’s witty but [...]

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Where did Carl and Marie von Clausewitz live in Berlin?

In 1818, Clausewitz was appointed director of the Allgemeine Kriegsschule (General War College), later called Kriegsakademie (Prussian Military Academy). He served there until 1830. Carl and Marie von Clausewitz now moved in an apartment in the same building. When historians talk about the Prussian Kriegsakademie, they usually have in mind its later location on Unter [...]

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My Clausewitz Summer Tour

I do believe that seeing places firsthand gives a special vigor and sensibility to a story. So this summer, in order to understand and describe better Marie and Carl von Clausewitz’s story, I decided to travel through Germany. Some of the places I know very well, some are new to me. I lived in Berlin [...]

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