RIP Stefania Zahorska you would have loved end-to-end encrypted group chats

Some highlights from Stefania's "state of the field re: Weimar cinema" trip in 1927:

Stays with the aunt who hosted her for awhile in high school to save money on a hotel, but remembers she's afraid of her aunt and panics about lodgings

Convinced her trip is cursed because her tram was #7 and it's an inauspicious numerological omen

Goes to stay with her cousin in Potsdam and commutes from Potsdam to Berlin every day rather than pay for a hotel or spend time around her scary aunt

Summarizes the state of Weimar cinema, dismissively, as "Businsss"

writing historical fiction will make you google things like “when we’re towels invented?” “how much did a towel cost in American in 1885?” “historical average number of towels owned per household”

Remember when Stefania told Jelonka that living in Germany for a few months would cure her executive dysfunction

Much like Stefania sensed that her heart condition would kill her nearly 30 years before the fact, I am often struck by a presentiment of my own death from asthma complications, sometimes proximal sometimes distal, but ever in view

Did my Xolair shots, please clap. Now I gotta shower and do laundry

Lately I've been avoiding food because antibiotics make me too nauseated then getting home in the evening and eating one Snake Meal Stew Bowl consisting of kimchi five ways

Intended to go grocery shopping on day off but conditions are "very high" to "extreme" for asthma and when I stepped outside I started gasping for breath even through a kn95 mask. I'm sure this summer will be fine and normal and I will be able to go to my job and the doctor and the grocery store without sustaining +50 HP damage from The Ambient Air

Return of my favorite rubric, "Stefania is the only person in this group photo who understands how cameras work"

Gd I love reading reviews of Stefania's professional art history monographs so much. Her analysis "blooms before us like a flower of historical materialism" lmfaoooo That's Right (literally more like--when she analyzes Baroque and Rococo, it's as though the flower of historical materialism blooms before our eyes)

It's a middle school stoner cliche to wonder "do other people see the same colors I do, phenomenologically" but I cannot overemphasize the extent to which people were applying the theory of relativity to the perception of color re: physics and having their minds blown then going "you guys...what if everyone perceives the world slightly differently. What if the interpretation of stimuli through the body's sensory apparatus were biopsychosocial and also totally individual. I have to lie down and invent abstract art about it"

This guy in Robotnik is talking about Południe (RIP) and he does a really clear, concise job summarizing Stefania's attempts to synthesize the history of ideas at the fin de siecle with the history of emergent art movements/aesthetic forms, which she refines and rearticulates in various ways between ~1924-29

They turned Stefania's apartment from 1912 into a hostel and the repainted/partitioned interiors are hideous but much of the original "skeleton" remains intact and most importantly. This means next time I go to Kraków I can stay in Stefania's room, like a crazy person

Bohdan's dad...gave a three-year-old bear...to the Warsaw zoo...in 1885...but there was an issue with money??? Stefania married into this family

I can't even make fun of Agnes Callard for becoming scholastically obsessed with marriage and sex after marrying her second husband because Bohdan Zahorski did the exact same thing after marrying Stefania lmfao. This man was down indescribably bad

Revisiting the classics, including one of my all-time favorites, that time Bohdan's dad placed an advertisement in the back of Nowa Reforma just to say "MY SHITTY SON IS FINANCIALLY IRRESPONSIBLE BUT HE IS AN ADULT SO HIS DEBTS ARE NOT MY PROBLEM"

I imagine Stefania showing this off like a scrapbook and saying "Reader, I married him"

Małgorzata Hendrykowska: Stefania Zahorska began working as a court translator in the 1930s

My autistic ass, with receipts: Stefania Zahorska was certified as a court translator from Hungarian on September 11th, 1913, while living at number 17 Plac na Groblach. She was the first woman certified as a court translator in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. You can find her listed as Ernestine Stefanie Zahorska on page 47 of the Verordnungsblatt des K.K. Justizministeriums volume 30, published in 1914