FRUITCAKE

Franz Schoendt, date unknown

Friend of Freud and intimate confidant of Cassirer, Franz Schoendt knew a thing or two about the lively life of the mind. Largely overlooked today, this giant of Jewish Mittleeuropean culture
 was a highly regarded feuilltonist in his day.

The scope of his concerns seems staggering today. In our age of hyper-specialization Schoendt seems much more than a third-string polyglot. He hovers like a dirigible looming from an Olympus of staggering erudition. He was a cerebral man at ease in worlds as diverse as the intricate stratagems of three-player Korean mahjong, the declensions of disabused, semi-deponent Latin verbs, post-Mishnaic agrarian litigation and the Russian Orthodox impact on sound pairing in early Zaum poetry.

(He has written extensively on all the aforementioned subjects.)

The most unlikely object of his sweeping inquiries (considering the fact that he was a lifelong diabetic), was the social and political history of candies and sweets. 

His seminal essay on the subject, Trockenobst ist wirklich Süßigkeiten? which appeared in the penultimate issue of the Hessian periodical Überflüssig Wissen was a dialectical tour-de-force and is still debated by confectionists on both sides of the Atlantic.

My dear yet strange friend David Schoffman has taken it upon himself to create two-hundred short video vignettes illustrating Schoendt's most important essays. After tackling the 1924 article Andalusischen Pfeifer and the 1931 prose poem Mythischen Aromen, David has just completed a personal homage to Schoendt's daring speculations on the taxonomies of dessicated apples, pears, apricots and grapes.