Trips to Europe were privileged moments in the cultural formation of the Brazilian elites at the beginning of the century. For Plinio and his family the occasion presented itself when Dona Lucilia had to undergo an operation in the old continent for a serious illness troubling her. Suffering from gallstones, she learned that a famous German physician, Professor August Bier,77 personal doctor to the Kaiser, operated on this illness with a new technique he had developed.
In June 1912 Lucilia Corrêa de Oliveira embarked at the port of Santos, accompanied not only by her husband João Paulo and her children Plinio and Rosée, but also by her mother Gabriela, her brothers and sisters, her in-laws, her nephews and nieces. This family group did nothing but visit the main European cities for ten months.
Professor Bier, the doctor who treated Da Lucilia in Berlin
In early July, the young mother was operated on in Berlin by Professor Bier. She then spent her convalescence at the thermal baths of Binz, on the island of Rügen, before going on to Wiesbaden and Cologne. The summer of 1912 was spent in that flourishing pre-war Germany to which the prince of Bülow in his Memoirs applies the verse of Schiller: “Joy reigned in the halls of Troy/ before the tall rock fell.”78
It was a summer of cold and bad weather, and it snowed in Paris. The “question of the East”, with the war going on in the Balkans, was constantly front-page news. At the beginning of September, while the Kaiser was on an official visit to Switzerland, a great Eucharistic Congress was held in Vienna, in the presence of the Emperor Franz Josef and of the whole Court. Europe, dominated by the figures of the two important emperors, Franz Josef and Wilhelm II, was linked by a strong network of dynastic bonds. In December 1912 in Munich, generations of princes and sovereigns gathered for the death of the ninety-two-year-old Regent Luitpold of Bavaria, known as the “patriarch of the reigning monarchs”, and then in Berlin on 24 May 1913 for the magnificent wedding of Princess Victoria Louise of Hohenzollern, daughter of the Emperor Wilhelm II, with Ernest August of Hanover, Duke of Brunswick.
On the left is Friedland Avenue, where the Hotel Royal is located, where Dr. Plinio’s family stayed in 1913.
Dona Lucilia and her family spent that winter in Paris, where they remained until the end of March 1913, staying in the Hotel Royal in Avenue Friedland. From there they went to Genoa intending to continue on to Rome, to pay homage to Pope Pius X, but the news of an epidemic in the Eternal City changed their programme. They began their return journey, disembarking in the port of Santos on 17 April 1913.
The journey through Europe was a memorable one for young Plinio, who was then four years of age. The cathedral of Cologne, with its towering spires and which for seven centuries has guarded the relics of the Wise Kings, was his first encounter with the wonders of Gothic art. The course of the Rhine speckled with castles, the snow-covered Alps, the splendours of Notre Dame and Versailles, the Ligurian coastline, a spectacular balcony overlooking the sweetness of the Mediterranean, left a profound impression on his soul. For each monument of Christian civilization he visited with his family on that occasion, he could have said, mutatis mutandi, what he wrote after visiting the Cathedral of Cologne. It states:
“Something mysterious asks my whole soul to be in conformity with the marvels of the Catholic Church! It is a school of thought, will and sensibility. A way of being is derived from there and for which I feel I was born. It is something greater than I and that came much before me. When I was nothing, it was centuries-old. It comes from the Catholic mentality of men who came before me and who also had, deep in their souls, this same desire for the unimaginable. And they even conceived what I did not conceive and did what I did not. But, it is such a lofty desire, so universal, corresponding so well with the profound yearnings of so many men, that the monument remained for ever: the Cathedral of Cologne!”79
Forty years would pass before Plinio would return to Europe, but the roots of the old continent were by now planted in his heart. In the meantime the First World War drew near.
Notes:
77. Professor of Surgery in Kiel, Greifswald, Bonn and Berlin, August Bier (1861-1949) is famous in the history of medicine for having introduced the use of a special therapeutic technique (biertherapy), especially recommended for acute and chronic inflammatory processes. Martin Müller, sub voce, in NDB, vol. II (1955), pp. 230-1. Dona Lucilia kept up a friendly correspondence with him until his death in 1949. J. Clá Dias, Dona Lucilia, vol. II, pp. 31-2.
78. Prince Bernhard von Bülow, Memorie, vol. III: tr., Guerra mondiale e catastrofe, (Milan, A. Mondadori, 1931), p. 121 (these are the first two verses of the Cassandra by Schiller).
79. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “O inimaginável e o sonhado”, Catolicismo, no. 543, March 1996, p. 28.