At first, Germany supported him; then it turned to support those who would tear Shah Reza Pahlavi from his Peacock Throne. Frank Bösch calls it a turning point in world history, a spark igniting the present. Nothing in February 1979 in Tehran hinted at what was to come. Michel Foucault, observing the nationwide uprising for Corriere della Sera, wrote: “This may be the first great revolt against the global systems.”

Three days. And the old powers had vanished, swept aside as if by a storm. Few noticed the foreboding tone in Foucault’s dispatches. Suddenly, veiled women stepped into the streets, declaring their rejection of Western modernity as law. Their message drifted into a vacuum of incomprehension. The future was assumed to belong to the West; what came instead was read as a return to the Middle Ages under Ayatollah Khomeini.

“The essential thing in the universe is not the organic, but information.” Heiner Müller

“The most valuable commodity I know of is information.” Gordon Gekko

The Oak Circle

They follow the lower Eder toward Bettelkopf, through the Kellerwald. The old field and village names end in -a, -mar, -tar, -loh, relics of settlements cultivated before 800. After the Frankish land appropriation came High Medieval colonization, supervised by gaugräfliche authority. Later foundations often failed, poor soil rejecting human ambition. Diana knows some of these vanished villages—ghosts in the map, fragments of knowledge few recall. She cannot say why she is drawn to such curiosities. Who knows what a Wüstung truly is?

The land itself reaches back to the Bronze Age. Hill graves, earthworks, fortifications mark the heights. Cult and combat walked together along the line of existence. Even the first spear carried with it a desire to signify. At least, that is Goya’s claim. Diana points to artifacts that have lain unnoticed for centuries. Yesterday, I wanted to plant an erotic scene… so delicate, on mossy ground, with birdsong and the perfumes of the forest, light spilling in like liquid gold. Diana in backlight.

Diana and Goya roam their homeland. They reach Maden on a blazing July afternoon. Maden, once the heart of the Hessian Gau, is now a district of Gudensberg. Until the 13th century, a junior Landgrave of Thuringia was always also Count of Gudensberg. Diana and Goya enter the inn Zum hessischen Jäger, run for generations by descendants of a famous Hessian. Johann Conrad Wilhelm Mensing (1765–1837) saved the Kurhessian treasury from Napoleon, earning ennoblement from Wilhelm I. Before his escape, the Elector had hidden a fortune of legend, which reached him in over a hundred chests in Prague exile. Consider the intelligence, ingenuity, courage, and stubborn patriotism required to go to such lengths for a young man who insisted on the purchased title “Royal Highness” and clung to absolutism. Mensing had no reason to help Wilhelm—the son of a blacksmith, who had fled poverty into the army, learned the hardships of a mercenary in America and Flanders.

Meanwhile, Malia and Agravain inhabit a world close to nature, yet far from it, behind a birdwatching palisade in the Marschbacher Moor, growing wild and true. Agravain descends from the Eder-Hessian Battenbergs. Though some claim the line ended after 1300, revived only in the 19th century, as the grandson of the Count of Gudensberg he knows the Battenbergs perpetuated the male line, raised kings, founded the House of Hesse, remained loyal to the princes of Lorraine-Brabant, and branched into Britain as the House of Mountbatten.

Malia and Agravain surrendered to the quiet intimacy of the forest. Beneath the moss and dappled light, they moved together with the rhythm of the land, skin brushing skin, breaths mingling, their closeness as natural and unforced as the sway of the trees. Later, they repeated this communion in the Eder Valley Forest, on a plot called Eichwald since 1100. A superstition long protected a dolmen in the oak circle from disturbance, until 1926.

The castle law once made Ruprecht of Gudensberg-Waldeck the judge of Ederthal. He carried out his death sentences personally in the oak circle, known as Galgenhurst. Hurst meaning grove—the term did not persist as a place name.

The Eichwald was a royal forest. I have seen official records of medieval interventions there. Oaks provided fine timber; acorns fattened pigs. War-related clearings and natural disasters spared the population until references to an old-growth stand finally appeared. Among these extensive forests, Diana was first encouraged toward love. The Eichwald has always been a stage for confessions of the body. Every girl from the Eder Valley completed her courtly and social lessons there before turning eighteen.

The dramatic scene opens onto the Eder, the Klingenbacher meadow behind the Krimmer Trutz. Stunted pines mark the rain-soaked moor into which Knight Ruprecht fled in the summer of 1073, when the iron collar closed in. No record preserves the sight of the broadsword he may have held for the first time in his life, during a flight both shameful and hopeless. Many had already lost their lives in this forest, following Ruprecht over sour, dangerously yielding ground, thick with pipegrass.