Southern Germany

Beginning If the Mozartian family tree was nothing like the prodigious trunk of the box, it was still not without striking features.

There were Mozarts in South Germany as far back as the end of the sixteenth century, and as remotely as the thirteenth the name stood on a document in Cologne.

To be sure, various spellings of Mozart existed in those distant times.

It appeared as Mosshard, Mozart, Mozart, and in still other variants.

I mean, just because I lived there.

So I think if, like most people I meet who have not spent time up in Northern Germany, they gravitate towards Southern Germany.

And I get it.

I mean, I've spent a lot of time in Southern Germany too.

And it is beautiful because of the Black Forest and the Alps.

And there's a lot to see there.

The basis of the poem is a historical incident.

In the year 1731, the Archbishop of Salzburg drove out of his diocese a thousand Protestants who took refuge in South Germany, and among whom was a girl who became the bride of the son of a rich burgher.

The occasion of the girl's exile was changed by Goethe to more recent times, and in the poem she is represented as a German from the west bank of the Rhine fleeing from the turmoil caused by the French Revolution.

The political element is not a mere background, but is woven into the plot with consummate skill, being used at one point, for example, in the characterization of Dorothea, who before the time of her appearance in the poem has been deprived of her first betrothed by the guillotine, and at another in furnishing a telling contrast between the revolutionary uproar in France and the settled peace of the German village.

By the end of the colonial period, the number of Germans had risen to more than two hundred thousand.

The majority of them were Protestants from the Rhine region and South Germany.

Wars, religious controversies, oppression, and poverty drove them forth to America.

Though most of them were farmers, there were also among them skilled artisans who contributed to the rapid growth of industries in Pennsylvania.

... uh, assumptions of what a, a character who sounds like this would be like.

With Hans, I'm like, what other accent do I wanna do? Fuck it, let's go, like a very, like goofy Southern German, uh, at least I think it's Southern German.

Um, [laughs] a very stereotypical German accent, uh, that sounds nothing like any actual German ever.

Uh, and then it's like, okay, well I'm gonna make him a little bit of a, a, a person who is as goofy as the, the voice inflection that I'm giving him.

And then from BYU professors, you may have heard of Hugh Nibley and Robert K. Thomas.

Jack is also known as the one who discovered chiasmus in the Book of Mormon while serving as a young missionary in South Germany in 1967, which is so cool.

And there's so much backstory there that We're going to resist the temptation to go into that black hole today, but there is so much there.

And there's some great interviews that have been done with Jack just on YouTube.

Everything about this problem is just perfect, which is one of the things I love about this story.

But the thing I love the most is this next bit about a little girl from Germany.

So one of the people who contacted us after our paper was published was a 13-year-old girl-

Okay

...

in Southern Germany.

Her name is Ronja Spanke, and she had been doing experiments to simulate what was going on here at Death Valley-

Wow

Beginning If the Mozartian family tree was nothing like the prodigious trunk of the box, it was still not without striking features.

There were Mozarts in South Germany as far back as the end of the sixteenth century, and as remotely as the thirteenth the name stood on a document in Cologne.

To be sure, various spellings of Mozart existed in those distant times.

It appeared as Mosshard, Mozart, Mozart, and in still other variants.