Episode 428: Library of Alexandria: A Collection of The Worlds Knowledge Lost

11/14/19 • -1 min

On this episode of the world famous Sofa King Podcast, we travel back in time and look at one of the most important creations of the ancient world—the Library of Alexandria. This was considered to be the largest library ever built by humanity (until the Library of Congress...), and it was destroyed in a raging fire. Or, that’s what people think, anyway. So, how big was this library? It contained upwards of a million scrolls and books from all of the ancient, Western World. From Egypt to Greece to Rome and all parts nearby, if you wrote it, they had it. It housed a hundred scholars who were paid to live there and simply think and invent. In this way, it was a precursor to modern research universities by a few thousand years. The library was established by Alexander the Great who wanted a major hub of learning to be in his new capitol, so the military could always have an advantage. The head librarians and the Ptolemys who took after his death saw something much more grand in this place. It was set out to be a place to worship the Muses, but its contents and glory spread as the new rulers paid more money to make it even more grand. The head librarian had the power to seize ships that came to port and make copies of any written work they had on board (copies on finer paper would be returned, but the originals stayed in the library). They’d send curators to all nearby city states to get the original works of anything they had written—science, math, mapping, literature, history, medicine—you name it, they wanted it. The destruction of this unparalleled center for learning is a mystery for historians to this day. Some say Julius Caesar destroyed it as he set fire to the docks of Alexandria. Others think this damaged the secondary building, but not the grand Library of Alexandria itself. Another camp thinks it was Christians who lived in the city and were rioting against pagans who kept written works in the towers. And yet another camp thinks it was Muslims who destroyed anything that didn’t mesh with the Koran. It was probably a lot more complicated than any of those single things, but the rise and fall of one of the most impactful houses of thought in the history of humanity is a worthy topic for your ear holes. Visit our Sources: https://ehistory.osu.edu/articles/burning-library-alexandria https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-africa-history-important-events/destruction-great-library-alexandria-001644 https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2010/06/the-perniciously-persistent-myths-of-hypatia-and-the-great-library https://www.crystalinks.com/libraryofalexandria.html https://www.geek.com/news/the-great-conspiracy-of-egypts-mythical-library-the-hall-of-records-1647814/ https://www.britannica.com/topic/Library-of-Alexandria https://www.britannica.com/topic/Library-of-Alexandria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-library-of-alexandria-is-long-gone-and-all-around-us

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Episode 427: Carl Tanzler: The Tale of The Corpse Bride

On this episode of the world famous Sofa King Podcast, we take a poke at some disturbing history and explore the life and love of Carl Tanzler. If you don’t know who Tanzler was, here’s a sneak peek—he lived with the corpse of the girl he obsessed over for seven years. But more on that later... Carl Tanzler was born to a wealthy family in Germany in 1877. As a young adult, he studied many differing subjects and traveled a lot. In fact, he found himself in Australia when World War I broke out, and he (like all other Germans) found himself living in a prisoner of war camp until the end of the war. He tried to escape once, but was finally released to the Netherlands at the end of the war. Eventually, Tanzler made his way to Florida to live with his sister after marrying a woman in Germany and fathering two kids. He took a job as a radiology technician in 1927 at a Marine Hospital in Key West. He lived apart from his wife and kids to do this job, but still supported them financially. Oh, and did I mention that when he was a child, he was visited by the ghost of Countess Anna Constantia von Cosel who told him one day he would find true love in a dark haired beauty? Well he did, and he did. Because a few years after taking his job, he met Elena De Hoyos, a twenty-one year old tuberculosis patient. He fell madly in love with her and did everything he could to find her a cure, all the while giving her gifts and jewelry and professing his love, which she didn’t reciprocate. To heal her, he did radical, fringe experiments that the hospital didn’t know about, took an X-Ray machine back to her house, and gave her all sorts of potions and elixirs meant to find a cure. Spoiler alert: it didn’t work. She died of TB, and Carl Tanzler paid for a lavish mausoleum to be built for her. He’d skip work nights to sit near her grave and sing her dark songs, and eventually she told him through the door to take her body home. So, like you do, he did. He took her home on a red child’s wagon and reinforced her corpse for endurance and love making. He lived with her for 7 years. So what finally got Carl Tanzler caught? How did he preserve her two year old corpse once he got it home? What scheme did he have to infuse her body with cosmic radiation to bring her back to life like the bride of Frankenstein? How did he get her hair? How did he have sex with the body? Why did the city put her body on display for a dollar a pop? What did his wife think of all of this? What did he blow up with dynamite before leaving Key West? Listen, laugh, learn. Visit our Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Tanzler https://www.buzzfeed.com/agh/carl-tanzler-elena-hoyos-mummy-corpse-florida-key-west https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/10/09/carl-tanzler/ https://www.historicmysteries.com/carl-tanzler-in-love-with-the-dead/ https://mind-blowingfacts.com/carl-tanzler-corpse/ https://rare.us/people/carl-tanzler-elena-hoyos-florida/ https://allthatsinteresting.com/carl-tanzler https://www.ranker.com/list/carl-tanzler-key-west-story/cheryl-adams-richkoff

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Episode 430: Ilse Koch: The Bitch of Buchenwald

On this episode of the world Famous Sofa King Podcast, we travel back to World War Two and tell the tale of Ilse Koch, the Bitch of Buchenwald. Everyone knows the names like Dr. Mengele and tales of SS Officers who tortured and murdered the Jews in concentration camps. But this obscure, and truly evil woman, largely escapes the lens of history. Born in Dresden, Germany, Ilse lived in the poverty that faced all of Germany in the aftermath of World War One. This very poverty was what led Hitler to power, by exploiting the desire for Germany to be great again. And Ilse Koch was exactly the type of person Hitler was aiming at. She joined the Nazi Party very early on, and by the time Hitler came to power, she and her husband Karl Koch were rewarded with promotions. Karl became the warden of a prison, and he was so sadistic that the Nazis decided to put him in charge of the construction and daily operation of Buchenwald Concentration Camp during the holocaust. Unlike a lot of German women during the Reich, Ilse was not content to simply sit at home and be a house frau. Instead, she took a job at her husband’s first prison to prepare herself for life in Buchenwald, and once there, she really went off the rails. For one thing, she took money from the Jews as they got off the trains and used it—a lot of it—to build a mansion and massive structure in which she could horseback ride on the premises. She was known to ride around the camp and whip prisoners with her riding crop for a laugh. Oh, and she was also know to do it in skimpy clothes, so if any of the men stared at her, she could have them shot. This behavior went as far as her having servants come to her mansion while she was in a nightie and then killing off any man that looked at her, or lining Jews up in the nude and having any killed who got an erection. But she was just getting started. Apparently, she liked tattoos. She liked them a lot. In fact, she would collect them. From dead Jews. And make lamps for the house and a favorite purse out of them. In fact, she figured out an evil scheme in which the doctors of Buchenwald would conduct experiments to see if people with tattoos were more likely to be criminal and have different physiology. The only way to know was to kill and dissect them. Then, she would have other prisoners skin and tan the dead Jews, so she could have her keepsakes. The things that she and her husband did in the camp were so awful that even the Nazi party said enough. They had both of them arrested and tried. What were the results of the trial? Why did Karl get a much more harsh punishment than Ilse? What did the US and the new West German government do to punish her for war crimes? What happened to all the skin she had gathered? Did she really have shrunken Jew heads in a glass case? How did she finally die? Listen, laugh, learn. Visit our Sources: https://biographics.org/ilse-koch-biography-the-nazi-bitch-of-buchenwald/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilse_Koch https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/06/26/ilse-koch/ https://allthatsinteresting.com/ilse-koch http://www.auschwitz.dk/Women/Koch.htm https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-witch-of-buchenwald-is-sentenced-to-prison https://www.ranker.com/list/ilse-koch-concentration-camp-guard/laura-allan http://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/classes/33d//projects/naziwomen/ilse.htm https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ilse-koch https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ilse-Koch