Dr. José Rizal's Dueling Cohort in Hirschgasse, Heidleberg,

 Did you know that Dr. José Rizal belonged to a dueling cohort in Hirschgasse, Heidelberg, Germany?

Hirschgasse, (Hirsch means Stag in German)  a place where University students held their dueling matches during Rizal's time (1886).

Well, in 1886, Rizal went to the University of Heidelberg’s Eye Clinic to specialize in Ophthalmology with the renowned German Professor Dr. Otto Becker.  While in Heidelberg, Rizal, the sociable, very friendly and gregarious guy became friends with a group of fraternity members, the Swabians, who sported jazzy bright yellow blazers and jaunty red caps.

                                         

José Rizal's dueling Cohorts, the Swabians.

The Swabians, or Red Hats.

The Blue Cap fraternities who duel against the Red Caps.

A young fraternity member with characteristic cap.

Student fraternities, or corporations (Burschenschaften) were of great importance and almost every other student was a member of these organizations. This student life milieu became over blown mainly through the 1956 Hollywood movie The Student Prince, which was a depiction of the carousing, dueling, womanizing, and beer guzzling student-life in Heidelberg.

Rizal joined his friends’ beer drinking sessions, and played chess with them at the corner Biergarten on Ludwigstrasse, a stone’s throw from his apartment.  Rizal’s newfound friends were enrolled in the law school.  Thus, much on campus mistakenly thought Rizal was a law student in Heidelberg.

Dueling within the campus was Verboten.  The administration believed it encouraged boisterousness and inclined to puff-up the wrong bravado that attracts undesirables. Rizal’s dueling student cohort insists it installs integrity and discipline.  Rizal sided with his fraternity friends, so they go regularly to a facility called Hirschgasse.  It was accessed north across the Neckar River over the hills, a half hour 's walk through Philosophen Weg, or else a 10 minute boat rowing expedition on the Neckar river.

In  1878 Mark Twain arrived in Heidelberg planning to stay overnight but ended up staying for two months in Heidelberg, billeted at the Hirschgasse Hof, then a hotel and restaurant.  He described the duel doings in that facility.

Now, one of the requirements for fraternities in Heidelberg was to show courage, skill, honor, bravery and determination.  The way to operationalize this was through dueling. The different fraternity organizations would form teams who would duel each other, their opponents selected at random. The protagonists are swathed in white protective bandages and gauze on shoulders, thighs, chest, and arms.  In addition, they wear a facemask of metal grill that protected the nose, mouth and eyes, but exposed a sheath of facial face especially on the cheekbone.  Rizal, not being a formal fraternity member, could not directly participate in the duels.  However he attended almost every other dueling match.

Dueling Clubhouse

Rizal’s dueling cohorts have the necessary symbol of determination and bravery by showing off scar marks on their cheeks  (the much admired "Schmiss"), and prided themselves in their self-acquired torn tendons, nicked scalps wrapped with bandages, as they limped in crutches, all in the spirit of good sport.

Rizal once noted they looked like “ghosts.”  In today’s lingo, they looked more like zombies.  Rizal would occasionally join the "Volunteer medical attendants".  In fact he allegedly observed great 19th century cosmetic surgery skills of repairing skewed eyebrows, dangling ear lobes, straightening displaced noses, uplifting sagging cheeks, propping up dislocated jaws, and fixing splintered thibia bones.

I was able to visit Hirschgasse in October 2012 in the company of  Rainer J. and Idi Weber of Schönau and Camilo Antonio of Vienna.  The place still stands there.  It's now a starred-hotel with a fancy restaurant, with the original dueling hall dotted with wall photos vintage 1886. Of special interest are the wood tables so characteristic of student life, full of name knife carvings, no space is spared!  What struck me was that the Prince of Germany (and future Chancellor), Otto von  Bismarck himself, craved his name here while enrolled at Heidelberg, and no doubt, participated in the boisterous Heidelberg student antics and bloody duels. 

The young Otto von Bismarck,  carved his name on  a Hirschgasse table top.

Heidelberg students save no space on restaurant wooden tables.

Unfortunately, Rizal never carried his pocketknife to Hirschgasse.  What a great missed opportunity!  We could have venerated his carved name there had he been more forward looking, and had he gained the perspicacity in leaving behind a future legacy regarding this event in the national home consciousness.

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Rainer J. Weber,  upon reading this blog, emailed to add,  "We had a great and hilarious time that evening in Hirschgasse where we felt Rizal´s spirit hovering in the restaurant."

Dr José Rizal's Paris "Bouillon"

                  Dr. José Rizal’s Paris Bouillon

It was June 1883.  Rizal left his Madrid digs to spend a summer in Paris.  He left even without the approval of Paciano.  But he sped off anyway.  His Paris anticipation knew no bounds.  His friends, Zamora and Cunanan  (medical students in Madrid) were telling him to join their exuberant discoveries and excursions.  And boy, was he hooked! The grandeur of Imperial France was on clear display.  The Third Republic ushered in the glittering "belle époque" that Rizal admired so much.

José Rizal was like a bull that escaped from its cramped den and now finds himself in a shop full of dainties of great antiquities.  He couldn’t help all this gushing  “Ahhs” and Ohhs”  He wrote on  21^st June: 

Here man is a real ant; there are streets whose ends cannot be seen, and nevertheless they are straight, wide and very well laid out; shops and department stores everywhere, coaches for hire are said to reach 25,000.  Passers by animate and throng the streets, the restaurants, café’s,”bouillons,” beerhalls, parks and monuments….” p 234.

On the way to my hotel, Sir Jean-Claude Pérrichon, Knights of Rizal Dimasalang chapter commander, explained and pointed out to me the antecedents of the Paris wide boulevards which Rizal noted as “well laid out.”

He said:  “Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann was the city’s urban planner.  During the French revolution the narrow and crooked streets became the natural barricades that prevented the army to sweep out the student revolutionists. At the end of the revolution, Haussmann straightened out the streets, rebuilt and standardized the kind of building façades that lined the boulevards:  (i.e. each building’s third floor must have grilled balconies beneath wide large floor windows.  Then the 6^th floor must again have overall balconies beneath the windows).” 

Look again closely at the street buildings and note the regular cadences of the aesthetic and symmetrical effects of the grilled balconies on the third and sixth floors of the buildings. 

This was what caught Rizal’s admiration.  What he wrote on his diary book was the wide boulevards.  What he forgot to describe were the buildings that lined those boulevards. But he must have admired the edifices clearly.

I followed Rizal’s Paris excursion.  At times, Rizal was so touristy, so matter of factly…almost lacking any imagination.  I could feel he was fully saturated by the visual, experiential, and in-your-face new experience.

“The Champ Elysées is a grand avenue, wide and long and full of trees, with theaters on both sides, from the Place de Concorde to the Arch of the Carrousel.”

The Vendome column is tall and big, full of bas reliefs depicting the wars of Napoleon in Germany, crowned by his statue holding in his hand the symbol of victory and a globe.

I dutifully followed my eyes from the base to the very top of the Vendome column.  Sure enough, Rizal had a good photographic eye.

The Place de la Concorde is an immense and wide circle inside which stands the Obelisk of Luxor. 

The obelisk is still there, a thin needle thrust among a throng of backpackers. I would have been delighted if Rizal had told us the character of the throng who gathered to admire the Egyptian Obelisk.  Rizal did not even mention that Napoleon “stole” this obelisk from his Egyptian campaign, nor how Napoleon chipped off the nose of the great Sphinx on the dessert plains of Gizeh.

Next, the monastery of the Abbey de Cluny caught my fancy.  Rizal was also fascinated by the Julian Roman baths near the monastery. Rizal noted something that would have made our contemporary modern tourists gasp with great surprise and delight:  he noted the array of “shoes” displayed within the Cluny museum.

In this same Hotel de Cluny there is a department where all kinds of footwear used in the world can be studied.  So that you may see how complete it is, I saw there slippers with red tops, designs and embroidery of the Chinese of Rosario Street, straw slippers costing a peseta, and other used ones.  It is there and not elsewhere that we can find which country has the smallest feet but natural ones.”   p. 254.

Rizal’s attention centered on the shoes that he declared were the products of the household shops in Manila's Rosario street in Binondo.  This artifact  could be  a great ethnographic find!  A modern Rizalista should go there, examine the displayed shoes, and then find the counterpart shoes produced by the Binondo, Rosario Street cobblers.  I bet you it is made of red "velvet abolorio" top and is commonly called a "zapatilla." It made me think of taking another look at Imelda’s shoes, where rumor says, are now infected with molds and meeting eventual desintegration.  We could have made it into a museum and have had tickets sold.  I’m sure many tourists would have wanted to gape at them, as Rizal had gaped into those foot fetishes of the ancient ages.

Well then, having seen monuments, museums and attractions, Rizal turns to observing the Parisien people.  And what does he say?  He tells us where he found them eating:

The majority of the people in Paris eat at either the restaurants or “bouillons.”  p. 235.

He did not mention the cafés, bistros, patisseries, charcuterie, brasseries. What is this bouillon that he writes for the second time?  (See José Rizal’s Reminiscences and Travels, pp. 234 and 235, 2011 National Historical Commission.) 

Rizal was writing to his parents and brother, sisters, nephews and nieces in the Philippines. They did not know what that French term was.  In my own kitchen, a bouillon is a paste of ground spices shaped into tiny cubes used to flavor a clear broth.  And so I asked my Rizalista guide, Maria Pilar “Boots” Magannon, what Rizal meant by “bouillon.”

She perused Rizal’s diaries again, and we re-read Rizal’s entry: carefully

The Bouillons Duval of the butcher Duval are found everywhere, they are neat and clean and one can eat in them quite well for two and a half pesetas. Those who wait on tables are women and the food is good and inexpensive.  We usually go there. p. 235.

In my own interpretation, it must have been a circa 1883 "turo-turo karenderia" where the menu was written in chalkboard outside since the cook changed the everyday menu depending on the availability of fresh produce.  Rizal wrote he and his friends ate there often.

Professor Esteban Magannon had an idea.  He announced, “This evening  I’ll treat you to dinner at the Bouillon Chartier.  It’s on rue Faubourg du Montmarte, off at Metro Grand Boulevard.  It's not the same one where Rizal went, but it’s the only remaining bouillon in Paris that still sports the 1883-90 ambiance of the Rizal era.”

Well, at least when we arrived, the men outnumbered the women waiters.  The décor is definitely 19^th century wood panels. The tables, chairs, stalls, wall paintings are vintage 1899-1900 era.  The food is still fresh and very good, but now with Euro inflation, it’s no longer that inexpensive.  The waiter added our bill right on the paper table cover. There was no pre-printed receipt:  clearly a 1883 practice. Sacrebleu!

Now if you want to see and imbibe the aura of where Rizal used to eat; go to a Bouillon.  See and use the old cloak stalls where he could have used to hang his frock coat.  Go, sit, order and savor the kind of meal that Rizal thought was “good;” but then in today's world,  be sure to reserve a place and be doused with Rizal Paris nostalgia.  

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Rizal returned  to Paris five years later to attend the 1889 Expositions universelles (world exhibition) He was dismayed and incensed of how the Philippine native Igorots were displayed inhumanely bereft of their dignity  (This is another topic for a forthcoming blog).

Accompanying pictures are coming.

My "Sabit" Thoughts. Knights of Rizal Country, Paris

The Knights of Rizal Chapter Commander, Sir Jess Sunga, has a distinctive way of demonstrating his loyalty.  Perched on his head was a jaunty black hat adorned with a shining KOR pin as he sauntered off the Gare du Nord platform as I arrived via Thalys train from Brussels on 20 October 2012. 

It was a classic act and it surely caught my attention!

In the meantime, Sir Leo Mojica was outside on the curb with his car precariously inviting a Paris gendarme to issue him a traffic violation ticket. We arrived just on time.

 I was whisked off and shown  several apartment doors where Rizal lived, the clinic where he trained as an ophthalmologist with Professor Dr. Louis Wecker,  Valentin Ventura's apartment, the Luna art studio,  and finally the park spot where a forthcoming Rizal bust is supposed to be installed sometime soon. I tried to fish an invitation for the 2013 event, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

It was Oktober in Germany and I enjoyed the time with several Knights of Rizal (Sir Rainer J. Weber,  Heidelberg-Wilhelmsfeld chapter and Sir Lucien Spittael, El Filbusterismo chapter) as I traced the footsteps of my ancestor, Dr. Maximo Viola, who traveled with Rizal that month of May 1887.  However, a month traversing Berlin. Leipzig, Dresden, Munich, Bavarian Alps, Schönau, River Rhine (from Rudesheim to Cologne) and then on to Belgium, made me long for a different Rizal.

My Paris Dr. José Rizal's Retracing trip was unsurpassed due to three convergences.

First, Sir Choy Arnaldo notified very responsible KOR officers of my Paris arrival. This was primarily why a  reception line at my hotel formed as I arrived composed of Sir Bernard Pot, Sir Jean Claude Perrichon, Sir Leo Mojica, Sir Jess Sunga, Professor Esteban Magannon and Mrs. Maria Pilar (Boots) Magannon (my old-time friend). Boots remarked:  It took a Dr José Rizal Studies to get us finally together again after so many years.  

Second, I was able to speak and exchange thoughts on the Rizal-Viola special friendship, after which we had a formal dinner at a cozy and delightful restaurant where we exchanged more ideas and more Rizal stories with KOR members and the Las Damas over the best Parisen gourmet dinner specials accompanied by sparkling wine.

Third, and most importantly, I was invited as the Guest of Honor to the installation of new officers and induction of new members of the Knights of Rizal. I could feel the Rizal spirit emanating from the audience composed of the KOR members and officers.   

Penelope V. Flores, author,  presents the Knights of Rizal Paris chapter Commanders a copy of her book:  

Luckily, I  remembered to bring with me, as presents, a couple of volumes of my latest book, The Philippine Jeepney: a Metaphor for Understanding the Filipino American Family.  In my own way of thinking, the Jeepney metaphor could also apply to the Knights of Rizal.

For example, Jeepneys have pasada lines like: Dimasalang, Avenida Rizal, Blumentritt.  How fitting!   These are the actual names of some Knights of Rizal chapters.

In front of a jeep is always found a slogan like, Nasaan ka Irog? Mr. Guapo. Similarly, the Knights of Rizal always have a slogan:  

                      Non omnis moriar.

Inside the jeep, one finds the names of the driver’s children spelled out in birth ordert. In the KOR. there is always listed a hierarchy of names when one receives email transmissions.

Most often, the jeepney drivers are men, but guess who are the real managers?  Yeah the “Missus.”  Similarly,  within KOR, the wives who have formed into Kababaihan or the Damas auxiliaries most often back up the KOR activities.

I noted Sir Jhun Oabel, Jr. nod his head in amusement when I said, “The passengers in a crowded jeep always hang out on the “estribo” in a form called in Pilipino “Sabit.”  I said, this is similar to members who are either half in or half out. Naka-sabit.  So, I exhorted members to get in for the jeepney  ride and pay their dues like the jeepney passenger.

What a superb way to end my Rizal October 2012. But, to our Knights of Shining Armour, the KOR, I raise my hand and say,

 I salute you and many thanks.